The one that means something happened." He looked at her. She was 9 years old and had her mother's eyes and her mother's way of seeing him clear and complete without the filter he applied to everyone else. Miss Clare next door is going to have dinner with me Saturday. He said he said it the way he said difficult things to Maya plainly without decoration giving her the chance to respond honestly.
My poured herself a glass of orange juice like a date. Yes, she drank her juice. Do you like her? I think I do. Is she nice?
She brought me coffee yesterday when my truck wouldn't start. That is pretty nice. Maya set down her glass. Did she ask you or did you ask her? She asked me.
Maya considered this with the gravity of a person who takes these things seriously. That's bold, she said. It is. Do you want to go? He looked at his daughter at the directness of her, the steadiness, and thought that she had somehow managed to become despite everything a person who met the world face forward.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I nodded." She picked up her backpack from the chair. "Then you should go and don't wear the gray shirt. You wear the gray shirt when you want to look like you're not trying."
She walked out the back door to the yard. Darius stood in the kitchen with his coffee. For the first time in a very long time, something felt possible. He was terrified of it. He went anyway.
The diner on Maple Street had exactly 12 tables, a jukebox in the corner that nobody ever used, and a waitress named Brena, who had been working the Saturday night shift since approximately the Clinton administration. It smelled like coffee and fried onions, and the particular comfortable exhaustion of a place that had never tried to be anything other than what it was. Darius got there at 6:58. He sat in the booth in the back, the one against the wall, facing the door the way he always sat in public spaces, and spent 2 minutes trying to decide if sitting in the back meant he was hiding or just preferred having his back against something solid. He decided it was both and that this was fine.
He'd worn the blue shirt, not the gray one. Maya had been very specific about the gray shirt. Clare walked in at exactly 7:00. She had on dark jeans and a simple cream colored top and she looked like someone who had made a real decision about how much effort to put in and landed exactly right enough to signal that she cared, not so much that she was performing. She spotted him immediately, crossed the diner without looking around the room and slid into the booth across from him like she'd been sitting across from him at diners for years.
"You look nervous," she said. "I'm not nervous. You're holding the menu like it owes you something. He set the menu down. I've been here before.
I already know what I'm ordering. Then why were you reading it? I wasn't reading it. You were gripping it. He looked at her.
She was already smiling. Not the careful smile she used across the driveway, but the real one, the one that moved all the way to her eyes, and something in his chest that had been very tightly coiled since yesterday morning came loose by about 20%. Burger, he said. Medium. No tomato, cheeseburger, she said.