I know it shows in section 4. She gave him a look, took her coffee, and stepped back to let him in. This was the first time he had been inside past the doorway. He had been in the yard on the porch at the outdoor table, but not inside. He registered it the way you register a threshold, not making too much of it, but aware.
Her house was the kind of lived in that told you things about a person. The bookshelves were full and slightly chaotic, the kind of collection that had grown through genuine reading rather than decoration. The kitchen table had a permanent workstation quality papers organized in a system that only made sense to her three different colored highlighters arranged in a specific order. A legal pad identical to the one he was holding. The walls had photographs, not staged gallery walls, real ones.
A woman who Marcus understood without being told must be her mother. A group of kids outside a building, the community center he guessed from when it was still open. A photo of Olivia, maybe 10 years younger, laughing at something off camera with her whole face unguarded and brilliant. He looked at that photo for a second too long. "That was the year we got the after-school program funded the first time," she said without him asking.
"We had 300 kids on the waiting list. We had to turn away 300 kids." Her voice was even. I cried for a week and then I went back to work. What happened to the program? We ran it for 5 years.
Then the funding dried up and the city pulled the space allocation and we were done. She sat down at the table. That's why this proposal isn't just a proposal to me. It's the third time I'm trying to do the same thing. And I'm aware that at some point people start calling that a pattern of failure rather than a pattern of persistence.
Marcus sat across from her. Who called it a failure? She looked at him. Nobody said it in those words, but someone said it. A pause.
My ex-husband thought it was quixotic was the word he used. Tilting at windmills. Olivia. When are you going to focus on something that pays? She said it with a precise mimicry that was clearly well practiced.
The kind you develop by having replayed a conversation in your head enough times to know every intonation. He was a practical man. Where is he now? Phoenix remarried has a very practical life, I assume. She opened her laptop.
I don't say that bitterly. He wasn't wrong about the financial reality. He just couldn't understand why I kept going anyway. She looked up at Marcus. Can you understand that?