He looked different somehow, not in any way she could name specifically. Nothing she could point to and say there. That's it. But something in the quality of his approach was changed. He walked to her table with the same unhurried steadiness he always had, but he looked at her first instead of at the pies, and he held her gaze for a beat longer than he usually did.
And she felt the thing in her chest that she had stopped trying to push down because it kept coming back regardless. "You had a line last Sunday," he said. "I sold out in 40 minutes," she said. Something in his face that was almost a smile. told my girls that," Rose said. "Obviously."
"Obviously," Margaret repeated, and the word came out differently than she'd intended, warmer, less professional, and she looked at the pies to recalibrate. "He bought two sweet potato and the dried cherry almond, which had become Rose's permanent standing order. He paid." He stood at the table for a moment, in the way he sometimes stood, now, not leaving, immediately leaving room for something. He said, "Would you want to come to dinner?"
She looked up. He said it like it was a simple thing which she understood was not carelessness but deliberateness. He had chosen the simple form because every other form was larger than he was ready to hand to her yet. The girls have been asking. Rose asked me four times this week which for Rose is.
He stopped. Rose doesn't ask for things four times. once and then she waits. He held her gaze. She's been waiting four times. Margaret said, "Nathan, it's just dinner," he said.
"You don't have to answer now." "I know it's just dinner," she said. And then, before she could think it into something too complicated. "Yes," he nodded. The nod that meant more than a nod.
"Friday," he said. "If that works. Friday works," she said. He picked up his pies and left. And Margaret turned to her next customer with her face still and her pulse completely unreliable.
And she spent the rest of the morning selling pies and thinking about Friday with the discipline of someone trying very hard to think about something else. She was not successful. Friday arrived with the particular pressure of days you have been thinking about for 5 days, which made them feel both inevitable and slightly unreal. She made a pie to bring. She was not going to arrive empty-handed at a house with two children who had been waiting for her, and she chose the sweet potato because Rose had said it tasted like sundaes, and Sundays were what she wanted to give them.