You're doing a good thing, she said. Completely matter-of-fact. The way she said everything. He looked at her for a moment. You're nine.
I'm nine and right. He couldn't argue with that. She went back to her room. He stood in the kitchen and thought about Saturday and felt the knot in his stomach that he'd been carrying for years tighten. And then, very deliberately, he made it loosen.
One breath at a time. The way you do when the thing you're afraid of is also the thing you've decided to walk toward. Saturday came the way difficult things always come faster than you're ready for. Darius wore his good charcoal slacks in a dark blue button-down that Renee had bought him years ago at a department store sale and that he'd kept for exactly these situations. Events where he needed to look like a man who belonged in the room before the room had a chance to decide otherwise.
He'd learned that lesson young. The presentation had to do some of the work before the person could. He hated that it was true. He did it anyway. Clare knocked on his door at 6:15.
She had on a deep green dress and her hair was down and she looked very simply like a woman who was comfortable in her own skin in a way that he had come to understand was harder to arrive at than it appeared. You look good, she said. You look good, he said. She looked at his shirt. Is that Yes.
Okay. She didn't say anything else about the shirt. She understood what certain clothes meant without needing the explanation. "Ready?" "No," he said.
"Let's go." She laughed. He locked the door. They drove together. The community center parking lot was half full when they arrived.
Darius pulled in and sat for a moment with the engine off. Through the glass doors of the building, he could see people moving around tables, the caterers setting up the warm institutional light of a civic event. "Hey," Clare said. He looked at her. "You don't have to be perfect tonight," she said.
"You just have to be there." He thought about all the times in his life he'd been told some version of that, "And how rarely it had turned out to be true. How often being there while being black and working class and not part of the right circles meant performing a careful version of yourself so that nobody had to be uncomfortable. He thought about how exhausting that performance was and how fluent he'd become in it. He thought about Maya saying you're doing a good thing.
Okay, he said. He got out of the truck. The first 20 minutes were genuinely fine. Better than fine. His supervisor, Richard Colt, was already there, stationed near the company's table with the particular satisfied energy of a man who had arranged things well.