"You said someone's waiting on you." "My daughter, Ava. She's nine." Marcus felt the smile come, the one that always came when he talked about her. "Sharp as attack, sharper than me most days. Gives me a run for my money at the dinner table."
"And her mother?" Marcus was quiet for a second. "Five years ago," he said finally. "Long illness. It wasโit was a hard road at the end." Harold stopped, looked at him, and this time it was the old man who understood completely without a single wasted word.
"So you're doing it alone." "I'm doing it alone." "Both of us, then?" Harold's voice was rough. "Building something for a woman who isn't here to see it."
Marcus hadn't ever thought of it that way, but standing there sweating in the late-afternoon sun, a stranger's lumber in his hands, it hit him square in the chest, because that was exactly what he'd been doing for 5 years. Building a life, a home, a childhood. All of it for a woman who wasn't here to see any of it come together. "Yeah," he said. His voice wasn't quite steady.
"Both of us." They finished loading the truck as the sun started going gold behind the trees. Harold leaned it against the side of the pickup, wiping his forehead, and looked at Marcus with an expression that was hard to read. "You know something, Marcus?" "What's that?"
"Most people see an old man struggling on the side of the road, and they keep on driving." Harold said it plainly, without bitterness, like a man simply reporting a fact he'd made peace with. "I watched two cars go around me before you pulled over. I'm not saying that to guilt anybody. People are busy.
"People are tired. I get it. But most folks, they keep driving." Marcus shrugged, uncomfortable with the praise. "I just saw somebody who needed help. Anybody would have stopped."
"No," Harold said. "They wouldn't have, and that tells me everything I need to know about you." "You barely know me." Harold pushed off the truck and looked at him. And there was something sharp and knowing in the old man's eyes now.
The look of a man who'd spent 75 years reading people and had gotten very, very good at it. "I know you stopped when nobody was watching," Harold said. "You didn't do it for a thank you. You didn't do it to look good. There wasn't a soul on this road to see you do it."
"You did it because that's just who you are when the doors are closed and the lights are off." He nodded slowly. "That's the only kind of good that counts, son. The kind you do when nobody's keeping score." Marcus didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything.
And then Harold asked him a question that came so far out of left field that Marcus actually laughed. "Are you married?" "Am I?" Marcus blinked. "No. Told you. Haven't been for years."