The morning of the fundraiser, Marcus was up at 4:30 again. Not from anxiety or not only from anxiety, mostly from the particular alertness that comes when you have built something real and the day has arrived to find out if it holds. He lay in the dark for exactly 10 minutes. Then he got up, made coffee, sat at his kitchen table with his legal pad, and went through the list one final time. 31 families confirmed.
Mrs. Patterson had recruited 11 people from her church who Marcus had never met, but who apparently knew Olivia or knew someone whose kid Olivia had helped or had heard the story from someone who did. Darius had driven down from Decatur the night before and was sleeping on Marcus' couch with a cheerful adaptability of a man who treated every situation as an adventure. Mr. Henderson had made calls to people Marcus didn't even know lived in the neighborhood. People who had moved away 2 or 3 years ago, but still considered this block theirs. The venue was the Henderson family's backyard, which was large enough and had the advantage of being directly across the street from Olivia's house, a fact that Marcus had not pointed out to Olivia when he arranged it because he was fairly certain she would find it too pointed.
He had not told Olivia how many people were coming. He had told her it would be small, manageable, low-key. Those were the words he had used deliberately because he knew that the word community in the context of something being done for her rather than by her would cause Olivia Bennett to dig in her heels and find a reason to cancel. He had told her it was just neighbors getting together. He had not technically lied.
He had engineered the truth. He was sitting with that distinction at 5:15 in the morning when his phone buzzed on the table. It was a text from Darius, who was apparently not sleeping as soundly as Marcus had assumed. You nervous? Marcus looked at the question for a moment, then typed back, "About which part? " Darius's response came in 12 seconds.
The part where you're doing all this for a woman you haven't told you have feelings for. Marcus put his phone face down on the table. Picked it up again. "This is about the house, the community center, the proposal," Darius replied with a single emoji. A face that conveyed a level of skepticism that Marcus felt was frankly excessive before 6:00 a.m. He put the phone down again and went to wake up Ava.
She was already awake, sitting up in bed with her horse book, which she appeared to have been reading in the dark because she was seven and apparently required no external light source when motivated. Is today the day? She asked. Today's the day, she closed the book. Is M.
Olivia going to be surprised? That's the plan. Ava looked at him with an expression that was three parts excitement and one part something more serious. "Dad? " "Yeah, you're doing something really good," he looked at his daughter. "I'm trying." "No," she said with the quiet certainty of a child who has made her mind up completely.
"You're not trying. You're doing it. There's a difference." He sat on the edge of her bed. "Where did you hear that? " She gave him a look that was so perfectly identical to her mother that it stopped his breath for a second. I made it up, but it's true.