She heard a small voice say very quietly to what she assumed was no one, "I can reach it." Then the sound of a step stool scraping tile. Then silence. Then the unmistakable sound of cereal hitting the inside of a bowl with the enthusiasm of someone who had absolutely no interest in being quiet anymore. Clare sat up.
It was 6:42 in the morning. She had slept 5 hours and felt more rested than she had in weeks, which said something she wasn't ready to think about yet. She pulled on her clothes from the night before, ran her fingers through her hair, and walked down the hallway toward the kitchen. The girl was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios and a library book propped open against the orange juice carton. She was small for eight with her father's serious eyes and a gap where her left front tooth used to be.
She was wearing pajamas printed with planets, and she had one sock on and one sock off, and she was reading with the focused intensity of someone who had completely forgotten the world existed. She looked up when Clare appeared in the doorway. Neither of them spoke for a second. Then the girls said, "You're the lady from the highway." Clare blinked.
"Your dad told you about that?" He said he gave a lady from work a ride because her phone was dead and the hotel was full. She considered this. He left out the highway part. I added that in.
Smart, Clare said. I'm Lily, the girl said. You want cereal? I sure. The bowls are up there.
She pointed without looking up from her book. Dad already left for work. He said to tell you there's coffee and to help yourself to anything. And Mrs. Patterson will come at 8 if you need anything, but he figured you'd be gone by then.
Clare stood in the kitchen of a man she barely knew being hosted by his 8-year-old daughter and felt something in her chest do a strange complicated thing. "He left already?" She asked. "He leaves at 6:15," Lily said, still reading. "Every day he says the highway is better before 6:30," she turned a page.
He also left his phone charger on the counter for you. "He said your phone was dead." Clare looked at the counter. There it was, his charger coiled neatly next to a yellow sticky note that said in plain handwriting, "Take it." "I have one at the office."
M. She picked up the charger. She stood there holding it for longer than made sense. "You okay?" Lily asked, looking up now, direct and unafraid in the way that children are when they haven't yet learned to be careful about noticing things.
"Yeah," Clare said. "Yeah, I'm good. Dad says it's okay to not be okay, Lily said matter-of-factly and went back to her book. He says pretending to be okay when you're not is just being tired in a costume. Clare stared at the back of a library book about space exploration and thought that was one of the most accurate things anyone had said to her in years.