In under a minute, he said, "That's the wrong answer, but he'll let it go because at least you didn't say Yankees." Marcus set the phone down and stood there for a moment in his kitchen. Pancake batter in one hand, phone in the other. Feeling something he couldn't immediately name. It took him a second to identify it. It was lightness.
The particular lightness of a thing going well when you'd braced for it to go badly. Amara appeared in the doorway, still in her pajamas, hair going in four directions. She looked at his face. Who are you texting? A friend from work?
From the train? She padded over to the counter, climbed onto her stool, and accepted the glass of orange juice he poured without breaking eye contact. "Is it Emily?" Marcus turned slowly. "How do you know about Emily?" "Mrs. Patterson told me you talk about someone named Emily." Mrs. Patterson talks too much. "Mrs. Patterson says, "You smile different when you talk about her." Marcus poured batter onto the griddle.
He kept his back to his daughter, which she was absolutely not fooled by. I don't smile different. You're smiling right now, Amara said. And you're facing the stove, so you can't even see the message anymore. He stayed facing the stove.
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.