The neighbors dog had reached its verdict about the world and gone quiet. The car with its music had turned a corner somewhere. The neighborhood had settled into the comfortable low hum of a Friday night finding its end. I'm going to tell Helen. Yes, she said.
Monday morning. Okay. And I'm booking you a flight to New York before I go back. Mia's going to want to come. Maya cannot miss school.
She's going to have strong feelings about that. She can have her feelings and stay in school. Clare said she'll survive. Tell her that I will. She picked up her tea again.
Looked at it. What does she think about all of this? Really? Andre was quiet for a moment. The real answer kind of quiet.
She thinks," he said slowly that you're the first person since her mother who has looked at me like I'm worth the complicated version. He paused. Her words were different. She's 12. She said she said you look at dad like he's actually there, not like he's useful or nice or convenient.
Like he's there. He stopped. I didn't know she'd been watching for that. Clare's throat did something she did not allow to become tears. Not quite.
She's extraordinary. Clare said she is. He agreed. She also ate two and a half tacos tonight and is going to be up until midnight claiming she's asleep. So, she's not entirely perfect.
The laugh that came out of Clare was the real kind, the involuntary kind that comes from something genuinely funny, arriving at exactly the moment when everything else is too much to hold. She laughed until she had to set the tea down. And Andre watched her laugh with the expression of a man who was filing away something he intended to remember. When she caught her breath, she looked at him and he was looking at her with exactly the expression Maya had described. Not useful, not convenient, like she was there like she was the specific actual irreplaceable person who was sitting on his porch on a Friday night in Atlanta and that was the only fact that mattered.
"Stop looking at me like that," she said. "No," he said simply. She held his gaze. Andre Claire, I'm going back to New York on Sunday. I know.