Baseball. Always baseball. She shook her head, but it was fond. He grew up in Ohio. Red's fan, which he will tell you is a character building experience.
That's his exact phrase. Loving the Reds builds character. He's not wrong. He's absolutely right. She laughed a small surprised sound like it caught her off guard.
He used to take me to games when I was little. He'd buy me a hot dog and a soda and I'd be more interested in watching the people in the stands than the actual game. And he knew it and he never cared. He just wanted to be there with me. He sounds like a good man, Marcus said.
He's the best man I know. She said it simply without performance. Then she looked at Marcus until recently. He held her gaze. recently. She tilted her head slightly, considering deciding.
Then you know why I sat next to you the first day when I almost fell because there wasn't anywhere else to sit. There were two other seats, she said. I sat next to you on purpose. Marcus went still. Why?
She reached into her bag and pulled out her camera, turned it on, scrolled back through the photos, and then turned the screen toward him. It was a photograph of him taken from a distance the far end of a train platform. Maybe 3 or 4 weeks before he'd ever spoken to her. He was kneeling on the platform and beside him was Amara, her pink backpack half open and spilling. One of the zipper poles had broken.
Marcus was fixing it not with frustration, not with impatience, but with this particular focused gentleness that you could see even through a camera lens. And Amara had her hand on his shoulder watching her father fix the thing. And she was smiling. And Marcus Marcus was smiling too. Even though he was tired, even though it was early and the platform was cold, and he was probably already running 3 minutes behind his system.
He was smiling at his daughter like she was the only thing in the world. Marcus stared at the photograph for a long time. "I took that before we ever spoke," Emily said quietly. "I didn't know your name. I didn't know anything about you, but I saw that moment and I thought, she paused, choosing the word carefully.
I thought, "That man still knows how to be gentle." After whatever he's been through, he hasn't lost that. Marcus's jaw tightened, and I'd been watching the people around me lose that. Emily continued, "My dad losing his strength, me losing my she stopped. Started again myself a little bit. Just the part of me that believed people were fundamentally okay.
I'd been losing that. She pulled the camera back and then I saw you fix a zipper and talk to your daughter like she was the most important thing in the room and I thought maybe I was wrong about the world being hollow. The train was slowing for the next station. Marcus said nothing for a moment. Then you took a picture of my daughter without asking.