He gestured vaguely at all of it. "The whole thing." "Come back," Harold said. "The frame's not done." "Dad," Emily warned.
"What? It's not. He said the joints were bad. He can't just leave a man's joints bad. That's not right." Harold looked at Marcus with total sincerity and total transparency and not one ounce of shame.
"You'll come back." Marcus looked at Emily. Emily rolled her eyes at her father. But when she looked back at Marcus, there was something in her expression that wasn't rolling its eyes at all. "The joints are bad," she admitted.
"He's not wrong about that part." "Yeah," Marcus said. "Okay. I'll—I'll come back. Finish the joints." He drove home lighter than he'd driven anywhere in 5 years.
He didn't tell himself it was nothing this time. He'd run out of that particular lie somewhere around the second sandwich. What he didn't know, what neither of them knew, sitting there laughing on a half-built frame in a dead woman's garden, was that the two of them had each spent years building a very specific kind of wall, and that those walls were about to matter a great deal. Because Emily Bennett had come home for exactly one reason, and it wasn't to stay. Marcus came back the next weekend and the one after that.
It started as the joints. Then it was the roof. Then it was little things, a hinge that needed adjusting, a window that didn't sit right. And then it wasn't even things. It was just that.
Saturday morning came, and Marcus found himself driving to the old part of town before he'd fully decided to. He started bringing Ava. That was the thing he hadn't planned. He'd been so careful for 5 years about who came into his daughter's life, so guarded, so slow. But one Saturday, Ava had a half day and no one to watch her.
And he brought her along, telling himself it was just this once. And by the end of the afternoon, Ava and Harold were thick as thieves. "He taught me how to whistle with a blade of grass," Ava reported in the truck on the way home, breathless. "And he says I can hammer next time. A real hammer."
"And Miss Emily showed me how to draw a house so it looks 3D. Dad, did you know you can make a house look 3D?" "I did not know that," Marcus said. "And Mr. Harold said—" Ava stopped suddenly.
"He said what?" "Nothing." Marcus glanced at her. "Ava." "He said you smile more now," Ava said, looking out the window.