He caught her hand when she started to lower it, held it for a moment, looked at her. Six months, he said. Six months, she said. He let her hand go. She picked up her carry-on, walked through the sliding doors, turned back once because she was apparently a person who always turned back once, and he was standing there on the curb in the early morning light with his daughter's dark windowed truck at him behind.
Alt alt watching her go without trying to call her back and that that specifically was what made her eyes go bright in a way. She had to blink three times to manage before she turned around and walked into the terminal. She texted him from the security line. You're making this very hard. He texted back 40 seconds later.
Good. It should feel like something. She almost laughed out loud in the TSA line. The woman behind her gave her a look. She didn't explain.
The first week in New York was a practical assault. The apartment that the foundation had arranged for her was on the fourth floor of a building in Crown Heights. Brookke, good light, manageable kitchen, a bedroom that was smaller than she expected, and a living room that was larger. She spent the first two evenings on the phone with Andre while she unpacked, narrating the apartment in real time, the way people narrate things to someone they wish were present. And he listened and asked questions.
And at one point said, "Is the bathroom tile the kind you can regrout or the kind you have to replace entirely? " Which made her laugh so hard she dropped. A stack of books, she was trying to shove. You're going to turn everything into a renovation project, she said. I was just asking about the tile. You were diagnosing the tile.
There's a difference. There isn't. He laughed. She realized she was sitting on the floor of her Brooklyn bedroom with books around her and a half unpacked suitcase and six months of a new city in front of her and she was laughing at a man in Atlanta asking about bathroom tile and she couldn't identify a single thing about that she would change. Then week two happened.
Week two was where the project started in earnest, and Clare discovered that lead event production meant something significantly more demanding than the job description had suggested. Helen Xiao was the foundation's director, a formidable, fast-moving woman in her early 50s who communicated primarily in bullet points and had the particular energy of someone who believed that the highest compliment she could pay another person was to give them a problem that was slightly too large for them. And then watch what they did with it. The problem Helen gave Clare was substantial. The foundation was mounting a six-month cultural initiative across three New York burrows, culminating in a 5-day public festival that would involve 47 partner organizations, 11 performance venues, a documentary film component, a publication, and an opening gala for,200 people.
The event had been in planning for 3 years. The previous lead had departed 6 weeks ago under circumstances that Helen described as a values disagreement with the careful neutrality of someone who had signed a non-disclosure agreement. Clare inherited everything that person had built, the problems they had left behind, and the trust deficit that comes with being new in a structure where the previous person's departure had made everyone uncertain. She called Andre on Wednesday of week 2 at 10:47 at night, which was not a planned call. It was the kind of call you make when you've been sitting with something too long and your body makes the decision before your brain does.
He picked up on the second ring. Tell me, he said, "Not hello, not it's late. Just that. Tell me. " Like he'd been waiting, so she did. She told him about the inherited mess.