"Keeps track of your face?" "She can tell when I'm thinking too hard. Says I get a wrinkle." Marcus touched the spot between his eyebrows, and Emily's eyes followed the gesture, and she almost smiled. "She caught me this morning. That's actually why I'm here.
"She called me out." "A 9-year-old talked you into coming?" "A 90-year-old told me being scared isn't a good enough reason not to do something," Marcus said, "which is a thing I told her once." So he shrugged. "Hard to argue with your own advice coming out of your kid's mouth."
Emily laugh laughed, and then her face softened. "And her mother?" Marcus looked out at the backyard for a second. "Five years ago," he said. "She was sick a long time."
"It was—" He stopped the way he always stopped because there weren't words that fit. "It was hard. Ava was four. She barely remembers her, which is its own kind of terrible. She draws her sometimes as an angel over the house."
Emily didn't say she was sorry. That was the thing Marcus noticed. She didn't do the thing everybody did. The reflexive, "Oh, I'm so sorry," that people said to fill the silence. She just looked at him and let it be as heavy as it was.
And after a moment, she said, "Five years, and you're raising her alone." And you still stopped for a stranger on the side of the road when you had every reason in the world to just go home. "Anybody would have—" "Don't," Emily said. "Don't do the anybody-would-have."
"You keep doing that. I heard you do it with my dad. It's not true, and you know it's not true." She held his eyes. "Two cars went around him. He told me you stopped.
"So stop pretending it's nothing." Marcus didn't have an answer for that. For the second time in two days, a Bennett had backed him into a corner he couldn't argue his way out of. Harold came back out with a plate of sandwiches that took him suspiciously long to make, and the three of them ate sitting on the half-built frame. And Harold told stories, outrageous ones, the tallest-building-in-Savannah kind.
And Emily corrected every one of them. And Marcus laughed harder than he'd laughed in longer than he could remember. It was midafter afternoon when he checked his phone and saw the time and realized with a jolt that he'd been there almost 5 hours. "I got to go," he said, standing up fast. "My daughter, I've got a neighbor watching her. I said I'd be back by—"
"Go, go," Harold said, waving him off. "Family first, always." Marcus grabbed his jacket. At the corner of the house, he stopped and turned back. "Thank you," he said, "for the sandwiches and the—"