Work and paperwork are different things, "Marcus, I've seen your desk at 9:00 p. m. You're not doing work you enjoy," he paused. "No," he said finally. "I'm mostly doing things that couldn't get done during regular hours because regular hours are for problems." She came in and sat in the chair across from his desk, the chair usually reserved for reps and HR visits, and crossed her arms and looked at him.
What do you do for yourself? Not for Lily, not for Meridian, not for anyone else. What do you do? He thought about it for a moment. That went on longer than a moment.
I drive, he said, like for fun. Just drive late at night sometimes when Lily's asleep and misses. Patterson can sit for an hour. Just get in the truck and drive with the windows down. Where?
Nowhere specific. That's what you have for yourself. She said an hour at night going nowhere. He didn't say it like it was sad and she didn't respond like it was sad, but they both knew what was sitting in the room between them. You should eat before you go home, she said standing up.
There's a place three blocks from here that does the best lemon pepper wings in Atlanta. I'm going. You can come or I can bring you some. He looked at her. "I'm not trying to make you feel better," she said before he could respond.
"I'm hungry and I don't want to eat alone." He was quiet for 3 seconds. "Let me get my jacket," he said. That was how the dinner started. Not as dates, not as anything they named or labeled or discussed.
"Just two people from the same company eating food after work on Tuesday and Thursday evenings when the timing worked out, which it turned out did pretty often. She learned things about him. The way you learn things about a person when they're not performing, not all at once, not in big revelations, but in the small, consistent details that stack up until one day. You realize you have a whole picture. He had played college ball for 2 years before a knee injury ended it.
He had married his wife Diane at 26. Diane had been a nurse. She died when Lily was four from an aneurysm that came with absolutely no warning. She had been healthy, young, vibrant, and then one morning, she simply wasn't. Marcus had gone from husband and partner to single father in the space of one phone call, and he had not had a single moment since then that didn't belong to either Lily or Meridian.
He told her this the way he told her most things matterofactly, without drama, looking at his food instead of at her, not because he was avoiding the weight of it, but because he had carried it so long that it had become part of his posture. invisible to him even when it was visible to everyone else. How do you do it? She asked him one evening every single day without she searched for the word without falling apart. I fall apart, he said. I just do it quietly.
When in the truck, he said on the drives to nowhere. She nodded. She understood that the idea of reserving your breakdowns for a place where nobody could see them. She had done the same thing. She just hadn't known until this moment that someone else did too.