Daddy, eat your breakfast. Is she nice? He flipped the pancake, watched it for a moment, then. Yeah, baby. She's really nice.
Does she make you happy? The kitchen was quiet. The pancake sizzled. Outside, December had settled over the neighborhood the way December does in Massachusetts. gray and permanent feeling like winter had always been there and always would be. Marcus thought about 10:00 phone calls and coffee orders and a photograph of himself on a train platform that he hadn't known was being taken and a woman who had looked at him and seen a builder when he'd only ever been calling himself a repair man.
Yeah, he said she does. Amara was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "With the certainty of someone who has given this considerable thought, then you should take her somewhere nice. I'll take that under consideration. Somewhere with good food," she added.
"Not just coffee on a train." He turned around then because he couldn't help it. She was sitting there eating her pancake with the expression of a woman twice her age who has arrived at an obvious conclusion and is waiting patiently for the room to catch up. He looked at her. This person, this small, extraordinary person who was more than half Renee and all her own self and something in his chest, did the thing it sometimes did when the love was too large for the moment to contain. "Your mother would have liked her," he said.
"He hadn't planned to say it." "It just arrived," Amara looked up. "Her eyes were careful." "Daddy, how do you know?" "Because she was good at seeing through things," Marcus said. "And Emily is the same way. They'd have figured each other out in about 5 minutes and then talked for 3 hours. Amara considered this.
Then she nodded once solemnly the way she nodded when something had been decided. "Okay," she said. He didn't ask what she was okaying. He understood. They met Richard Carter on a Sunday afternoon, 2 weeks before Christmas.
Marcus had not been nervous about many things in his adult life. not about job interviews, not about Rene's first hospital visit, not about his first month as a solo parent. He'd faced those things the way he faced everything by moving forward because stopping wasn't an option. But sitting in the parking lot of Massachusetts General Hospital at 1:47 p.m. on a December Sunday, he was nervous. He sat in his car for 3 minutes, checked his reflection in the visor mirror, which he never did. Fixed his collar, checked his reflection again.
His phone buzzed. Emily, he's awake and he had soup for lunch. And he told the nurse she was wrong about the infield fly rule. It's a good day. Come up.
He got out of the car. Room 414 was at the end of a corridor that Marcus navigated with a particular alertness of a man who had spent too much time in hospitals and never quite stopped reading them for bad news. He heard the television before he reached the door. Baseball predictably the low murmur of a spring training recap and then Emily's voice saying something he couldn't make out and then a deeper voice slower but still carrying authority responding. He knocked.