Not quite gratitude. Something older than both of those things. Some need he hadn't acknowledged in years. He nodded once. He got off the train.
But on the platform, waiting for the next train back toward Brockton, he found himself thinking not just about Amara, though Amara was the primary thing, the everything. The reason he was standing on this platform at 7:14 a.m. moving in the wrong direction, but about the way Emily had looked at him when she said it, like she meant it, like she knew something about him, that he was still in the process of learning about himself. Amara was fine. The cut was shallow, the knee was bruised, and by the time Marcus arrived, she had been cleaned up and bandaged and was sitting at Mrs. Patterson's kitchen table eating a biscuit and regarding her injury with the solemn pride of a child who has sustained a wound and found it interesting. "Daddy," she said when he walked in and crouched down to look at her.
"I have a real cut. I see that." Mrs. Patterson put a bandage with stars on it. "Dars are the right call. Can I go to school late?" Yes. She seemed satisfied with this outcome.
She held out her arms and he picked her up all 53 lbs of her and held her against his chest and breathed her in the way he had been doing since she was 3 days old. And he'd learned that holding her grounded something in him that nothing else could reach. I called you right away. Mrs. Patterson said from across font watching them with the particular gentleness of a woman who had spent 67 years understanding what she was looking at. I know.
Thank you. She kept saying, "Get my daddy. Not call 911. Not call the doctor. Get my daddy." Mrs. Patterson smiled.
That means something. He knew it meant something. It meant something so fundamental that most days he couldn't look directly at it without the weight of it being almost too much. Later that afternoon with Amara at school and Marcus back at work making up the Devo found him at stood there for a moment without speaking. What?
Marcus said nothing. Devo looked at him. You just looked different today. Different how? Like something moved.
Dearu tilted his head slightly. The train woman. Marcus kept his eyes on the panel in front of him. Amara fell this morning. I heard.
She okay? She's fine. But the train woman, she said something. Marcus was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Amara has the best dad." Dear Rose absorbed this and and it hit me different, Marcus said.