Beyond his ability to be casual about it. She numbered them with bullet points and everything. He picked up her carry-on. She's been preparing for two days. They walked out of the airport together.
And the Atlanta air hit her different from New York air. Warmer even in spring, carrying the specific combination of humidity and green and urban heat that she had grown up breathing and had spent 6 months unknowingly missing. And she breathed it in deliberately all the way. The way you breathe something when you're trying to memorize it. You okay?
Andre said beside her. I forgot what it smelled like, she said. He looked at her, understanding exactly what she meant without needing it explained. I know, he said. I know.
Dinner was tacos at a place in Little Five Points that Maya had chosen on the authority of a very long review she'd read online, which turned out to be fully justified. Maya sat across from Clare with her numbered notebook open beside her plate and worked through her questions with the methodical precision of someone who had been thinking about this conversation for tudas and was not going to let tacos distract her from it. Question three was is New York actually as loud as everyone says or is that a stereotype? Question seven was did you ever see anyone famous on the subway? Question 11 was, "Do people there know how to drive or is that a stereotype, too? " Question 13 was, "Do you think you'll want to live there permanently someday? " It was asked in the same tone as the others with the same casual precision, but it was question 13.
Clare looked at Maya across the table. Really looked at her at this 12-year-old who had numbered her questions in a notebook and bulletpointed them and sat here eating a fish taco, waiting for an answer with the composed expression of someone who had decided to be calm about something she cared about. No, Clare said. Maya's face stayed composed. Why not?
Because the things I'm going back to are here, she said. She didn't look at Andre when she said it. She looked at Maya. Because the question had been Mia's and the answer deserved to go directly to the person who had asked it permanently doesn't fit with the life I'm actually building. Maya looked at her for a moment.
Then she wrote something in the notebook. What did you write? Clare asked. No, Mia said the answer to question 13. She looked up.
I'm thorough. Andre made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a cough and was entirely both. After dinner, after Maya had been dropped at home with Lucille's phone number on the counter, scanned and strict instructions about bedtime that she acknowledged with the confident nod of someone who had no intention of honoring them. Andre and Clare sat on his porch, not her porch, his the way they had been doing or almost doing or almost admitting they were doing for 2 years. The Atlanta night was warm enough for it.
The neighborhood was doing its Friday night things around them. A car with its music up too loud moving down the street. The neighbors three houses down laughing at something on their own porch. A dog somewhere deciding that this was the moment to have opinions about the world. Clare had her feet pulled up on the chair and her hands wrapped around a cup of tea he'd made without asking if she wanted it because he knew she wanted it.