I'd been watching you, not the way she might have taken it from anyone else. Just he noticed people. He paid attention. It was the same quality that had made him pull over on a highway at midnight. "You watch everyone like that?"
She asked. "Just the people I think are worth paying attention to," he said. The table between them went quiet. She picked up her food. He picked up his.
Outside, Atlanta traffic moved through its evening rhythms, indifferent and loud. And inside the restaurant, two people who had both survived enormous things sat next to each other. And for once, for the first time in a long time, neither of them was alone with it. She moved into her apartment on a Saturday. Marcus showed up at the extended stay at 9:00 in the morning with his Silverado and without discussion loaded her suitcase and her three boxes and the secondhand lamp she'd bought at a thrift store into the truck bed.
Lily was with him. I told Dad I wanted to help. Lily explained holding a roll of packing tape like it was a weapon she intended to use. He said there wasn't much to carry. I said that's fine.
Two people is faster than one. Clare looked at her. Your math is correct. she said. "I know," said Lily. "The apartment was on the third floor.
The elevator was small." Lily decided she was strong enough to carry the lamp by herself and carried it with a focused intensity for exactly one flight of stairs. Before Marcus quietly took half of it without comment, and Lily let him without admitting she'd needed him to. Clare watched this exchange happen in complete silence and felt something she couldn't name shift very gently in her chest. When everything was in and the boxes were stacked in the middle of the living room and the lamp was by the window and Lily had already decided which wall the bookshelf should go on.
Marcus looked around the empty apartment and said it's a good place. Yeah, Clare agreed. Lily was examining the bathroom faucet with the evaluative energy of a very small home inspector. "You need anything else?" Marcus asked.
"No," she said. "I think I've got it." "Okay," he called Lily. Lily came back. She stood in front of Clare with the directness she had apparently inherited fully from her father and said, "I hope you like it here."
"I think I will," Clare said. Dad says, "You've had a hard year, Lily." Marcus said, "What she has?" You said so. She looked back at Clare.
He says, "Hard years are just how you find out what you're made of." He says it at home like a lot, does he? Clare said, "He says it every time I have a bad day at school." She considered. It's actually pretty helpful usually.