He looked at the filled-in afternoon and the charcoal linen and the design magazine with 17 sticky notes. He thought about Maya asleep upstairs this morning. He thought about the alternator and the $17 and the shoes with the separated soul. And then he thought about something Clare had just done that almost nobody did. She had asked plainly without games, without pretending.
The question was something smaller than it was. "I'm a black man in a neighborhood where people already watch me close when I pull into my own driveway," he said. "Not as a warning, as a fact. You understand that?" Adding.
He paused. That adding something like this changes the temperature of what they're watching. I know, Clare said. She didn't flinch. I know that.
And I'm not asking you to be careless about that. I'm not asking you to pretend those things don't exist. She paused. I'm asking you to dinner. And the curtains?
She tilted her head. What about them? You ask me to close them. He looked at the drawn panels. Before anything even happened, before you even asked the question, Clare was quiet for a second.
Then, because I wanted the first decision to belong to us, not to whoever was walking their dog. He stood very still. That answer was doing something to him that he didn't have immediate language for. I have a daughter, he said. She's nine.
She's the most important person in my life and everything I do. I think about how it lands on her first. I understand that. You say you do. I do.
I'm not asking to take anything from your life. I'm asking to be added to it. Carefully at whatever pace makes sense. She let the words land before she added. But I've been watching you come home tired for a year.
I've been watching you fix everything by yourself and ask for help from nobody. And I just She stopped. I just wanted to sit across a table from you and find out who you are when you're not in the middle of fixing something. Darius was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the curtains.
He thought about the year of coffee mugs and borrowed ladders and short conversations across a driveway. He thought about how there had been something there all along. Something he'd been very deliberately not looking at directly. The way you don't look directly at the sun because some things you notice and then carefully arrange your life around not noticing again. He thought about the last time he'd wanted something for himself.
Not for Maya, not for the house, for himself. He picked up his toolbox for one second. Clare's expression shifted just slightly. Just enough to tell him she thought he was walking out. What time?