Say it. You're the person I want at my Thanksgiving table, Marcus said. You're the person my son invited before I had the nerve to ask you. You're what comes next, Clare. That's what you are.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached over and adjusted the temperature on the back burner, which he had left slightly too high, and said, "Okay, then I'm going to need you to tell me something about Miss June before she gets here. Something that helps me understand her," Marcus thought. She made Aaliyah's wedding dress by hand. "Every stitch.
It took her 8 months," Clare went. Still, "She's a woman who gives everything she has to the people she loves," Marcus said. And she's still grieving. Same as all of us. So whatever she says today, if it's sharp, it comes from love, not cruelty.
I can handle sharp, Clare said. I know you can. She looked at him. Can you if it goes sideways? Yeah, he said.
Because you'll be there. She blinked. Looked back at the stove. Add more pepper, she said. You just said more pepper.
The greens need more pepper than you think, she said. Trust me. He added more pepper. They were right. Kesha arrived at noon with Miss June and Marcus met them at the front door and he felt the moment shift the way air shifts before something significant.
A pressure change, a weather event coming. Miss June was 71 years old. Small and precise in the way of women who have always known exactly who they are. She wore her church clothes on Thanksgiving because that was how she'd done it her entire life. And she saw no reason to change.
She hugged Marcus and then Darius, who met them at the door, and she held Darius's face in both hands and looked at him for a long moment, the way she always did, searching for Aaliyah in him and finding her and being glad and heartbroken simultaneously. Then she looked past them into the house and saw Clare standing in the kitchen doorway. The house went quiet in the specific way that houses go quiet when something important is happening and everyone present knows it. Miss June looked at Clare. Clare looked at Miss June and Marcus stood between them and said, "Miss June, this is Clare Whitmore.
She's my neighbor and my paused for one second, the last second of deciding and she's important to me." Miss June said nothing. She walked past Marcus. She walked to Clare. She stood in front of her and looked at her the way she'd looked at Darius, searching, honest, taking inventory of something that mattered.
Clare did not look away, did not shift, did not perform. She held Miss June's gaze and let herself be seen. Miss June said, "You cook?" Clare said, "I made the pie." Marcus did everything else.