He didn't say he'd been watching. He didn't have to say it. Patricia said, "I'm his mother's age and I can read a room. " She handed Clare the last dish. "I knew before the soup course. " Clare looked at her mother. "Why didn't you say anything? " "Because the right thing was to let you find it yourself. " Patricia turned off the water, dried her hands.
"Some things you can't tell your child. You have to wait until they come back from New York and tell you. " Clare laughed. Her mother hugged her briefly and firmly. The Patricia Morgan version of a hug. Not sentimental, just true.
They walked back to the dining room together and Andre was there at the table with Lucille on one side and Maya on the other and James at the end and Dedra in the middle eating the last of the bread rolls. And he looked up when Clare walked in and his face did the thing, the real thing first, always the real thing first. And she walked to the empty chair beside him and sat down and his hand found hers under the table and nobody performed anything at all. Later that night on his porch, she gave him the handwritten copy of the boyfriend agreement that she had carried in her wallet for 18 months. She had found it 3 days after the anniversary dinner and kept it not as a joke but as a reminder of of a Friday night when a man's set one rule and it turned to be the truest thing anyone had ever done for her.
She had added one line to the bottom in her own handwriting. He unfolded it. Read it. Read her line. It said, "Thank you for not letting me lie about who I was.
Even to myself. " He looked at it for a long moment. Then he folded it carefully and put it in his own pocket. "I should have asked you out," he said. "The day you brought back the coffee maker. " "You should have," she agreed. "In my defense," he said.
"You borrowed the drill 2 days later. I thought there was a system. There was a system, she said. The system was me finding reasons to knock on your door. I know, he said.
I was hoping. She looked at him. For how long since the ladder? He said simply. She thought about the ladder.
The first tool she'd ever borrowed. 14 months into living next door to him when she needed to clean her gutters and had stood on her porch looking at the height problem. And he had appeared in his driveway and said without being asked, "I have a ladder. " and carried it over and held it at the base while she climbed and then stayed to talk for an hour after she came down. That was 22 months before the anniversary dinner. She did the math.