Ava finally looked up. She's really nice, Dad. She is, Marcus said carefully. She said she knows how to make chocolate lava cake. That's a specific piece of information.
I might have mentioned that chocolate lava cake is your favorite. Marcus crossed his arms. Ava, what? She looked at him with an expression of pure practiced innocence that she had clearly been working on for years. I was just talking.
She asked what your favorite food was. She asked. Okay, I brought it up, but she seemed interested. Marcus looked at his daughter, seven years old, sitting at the kitchen table with her markers and her treasure map and her completely transparent agenda and felt something move through him that was too complicated to name all at once. He missed Denise.
He missed her so much right now. It was a physical thing because Denise would have loved this, would have seen exactly what their daughter was doing and laughed until she cried. And at the same time, alongside the grief, not replacing it, something else, something new, something that felt cautiously and almost against his will, like beginning. Set the table, he said. Dinner in 20 minutes.
Ava grinned and went back to her map. Marcus went to the kitchen sink and stood there for a moment with the water running over his hands, looking out the window at the fence line, at the fresh white paint visible just above the boards. He thought about the way Olivia had said, "I know how that is." About the weight underneath those words that matched something he carried, about two cups of coffee and 4 hours of work and a conversation that had covered more real ground than most conversations he'd had in the past 3 years. He turned off the faucet, started dinner, and for the first time in a very long time, Marcus Carter did not run through the list of everything he hadn't gotten to yet. He just cooked.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, quiet and careful and not quite ready to be spoken aloud, a thought moved. Maybe, just maybe, he would not know not yet how badly both of them needed that maybe. He would not know not yet what Olivia was carrying behind her easy smile and her direct eyes and her steady paint roller. He would not know about the bank notices that had started arriving in her mailbox 4 months ago, or the savings account that was almost empty, or the house she was fighting to keep with the quiet ferocity of a woman who had already lost too many things she couldn't get back. He would not know any of that yet.
All he knew standing in his kitchen on a Saturday evening was that his daughter was drawing a treasure map at the table, and the yard was starting to look like something Ava could be proud of. And the neighbor next door had handed him a cup of coffee without being asked and had looked at him like he was a full human being. That was enough for right now. That was more than enough. But the story that was beginning between these two broken, stubborn, quietly determined people, the story that started with a broken hose coupling and a stream of water and a smirk that stopped Marcus Carter dead in his tracks, that story was only just getting started and it was going to change everything.
The second Saturday came faster than Marcus expected. He had told himself all week that it was just a repair job, a debt he owed. You break something, you fix it, you move on. That was the rule. That was the only way to keep things clean and simple.
And inside the boundaries he had built for himself over 3 years of learning exactly how much he could handle and exactly how much he could not. He had told himself that on Monday when he was routing trucks and his mind drifted sideways to the way Olivia had handed him that coffee without being asked. He had told himself that on Wednesday when Ava casually mentioned three times that Miss Olivia had waved at her from the driveway that morning. He had told himself that on Friday night when he was too tired to sleep and lay in the dark and thought about what she'd said. I know how that is.