"Seeing anybody?" "Mr. Bennett." "Harold." "Harold. With respect, where's this going?"
Harold folded his arms and leaned back against the truck. And for the first time all afternoon, a slow smile spread across his weathered face. "My daughter's coming into town tomorrow," he said. Marcus stared at him. "Oh."
"Oh," Harold agreed. "You'reโ?" Marcus shook his head, laughing in disbelief. "I just met you. I helped you load some boards, and now you're trying to marry me off to your daughter." "I'm not saying marry her."
Harold held up both hands, the picture of innocence. "Good Lord, that would be a fast conversation, even for me." "It would be a very fast conversation." "I'm just saying two good people ought to at least be in the same room once. See what happens.
"Or doesn't. No harm in it." Marcus wiped his hands on his jeans and shook his head again, still smiling, but firmer now. "Harold, listen. I appreciate it. I do, but you don't know the first thing about me."
"You met me 45 minutes ago. You don't know if I'm any kind of man to introduce to your daughter." Harold looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the truck bed, loaded now, full. All those boards stacked neat and safe, where a minute ago they'd been dragging an old man to his knees.
"I know you stopped," Harold said simply. And that, that one sentence landed somewhere in Marcus that he couldn't quite reach to defend. "I know you stopped." Marcus drove home that evening with the windows down and his head full. He kept turning it over.
The old man, the truck, the garden house that a dead woman had wanted, and a living man was finally building. Both of us building something for someone who isn't here to see it. And underneath all of it, quieter but harder to ignore: my daughter's coming into town tomorrow. He shook his head at himself. It was ridiculous.
He wasn't going back. He'd helped a stranger, and that was the end of it. A good deed, a nice conversation, a story he might tell Terrell on Monday to prove that chivalry wasn't completely dead. That was all. He was not going back to get set up on a blind date by a 75-year-old man he'd known for less than an hour.
That was final. He pulled into his driveway, and the porch light was on, and through the front window he could see Ava at the kitchen table, chin in her hands, drawing something with the deep concentration only children can manage. The sight of her undid something in his chest the way it always did. He walked in and she looked up. "You're late," she said.