"I know. I'm sorry, baby. I stopped to help somebody." "Help who?" "An old man. His truck."
Marcus set his keys down and sat across from her at the table, suddenly very tired and very glad to be home. "He couldn't lift some boards, so I helped him lift them." Ava considered this the way she considered everything, seriously and completely. "Was he nice?" Marcus thought about it.
"Yeah," he said. "He was real nice. Little bit crazy, but nice." "Crazy how?" "Justโ" Marcus laughed, waving it off.
"Grown-up crazy. Don't worry about it. What are you drawing?" She turned the paper around to show him. It was the three of them. She'd drawn it a hundred times, and she'd draw it a hundred more.
Her, him, and a third figure off to the side. An angel with wings, a woman with a halo, and a smile floating above the house. "It's us," Ava said. "And Mom's watching." Marcus looked at the drawing for a long moment.
The eggs, the sandwiches, the 4:45 mornings, the counting of dollars in the dark, the standing up when everything in him wanted to stay down. All of it right there in a child's crayon. "It's beautiful," he said, and his voice caught on it. "It's real beautiful, baby." She beamed.
Then she went back to coloring, adding more flowers around the house because in Ava's world, you could never have too many flowers. Marcus sat there and watched his daughter draw. And that's when he made the mistake. He didn't mean to. But at some point over dinner, when Ava asked again about the old man, he found himself telling her more of it.
The truck, the boards, the garden house he was building for a wife who was gone. And Ava, who noticed everything, who had inherited her mother's gift for seeing straight through a person, set down her fork and looked at her father across the table. "Dad," she said, "you've got your thinking face on." "I don't have a thinking face." "You do."
"You get a wrinkle right here." She pointed at her own forehead. "Right there. You've got the wrinkle." Marcus reached up and sure enough felt the crease between his eyebrows.
He smoothed it out with his thumb, but it was too late. "There's nothing to think about," he said. Ava narrowed her eyes at him, 9 years old and reading him like a book. "You're a bad liar, Dad," she said. "You always have been."