She paused. Good traditions work like that. They don't arrive complete. They get built. Lucas nodded with the gravity of someone filing important information.
Our tradition is pizza and a movie, he said. But now you're here, so it's growing. He said it simply as a fact and went back to grating cheese. Victoria looked across the counter at Daniel. He looked back at her.
Neither of them said anything. They didn't need to. The movie turned out to be a 1995 adventure film that Lucas had found described in a list online as a classic overlooked American story, which was Daniel suspected not entirely the selection criteria, but a retroactive justification. It was good. The three of them sat on the couch, Lucas in his usual corner with the blanket, Daniel in the middle.
Victoria on the other end with a throw pillow she'd found and deployed without ceremony and ate pizza and watched it. And Lucas asked questions during the quiet parts and Daniel answered them and Victoria occasionally supplied context he didn't have and it was the kind of evening that doesn't require documentation to be remembered. At the end, Lucas fell asleep. Not dramatically, he just went quietly the way he always did when the day had finally used him up. He tilted sideways until his head was on Daniel's shoulder and his breathing changed.
And that was that. Daniel and Victoria sat in the low light with the credits rolling and a sleeping boy between them. "Thank you for having me," she said quietly. "Thank you for coming." She looked at Lucas.
"He's going to be remarkable." "He already is. I mean, when he's grown," she paused. The things he already knows about how to be present, about how to say true things, about how to extend toward people. He didn't learn that from school.
He learned it from being here, Daniel said. From the garage, from Jimmy and Miss Perkins and Saturday mornings. He paused from watching. She looked at him. From you, she said he didn't deflect it.
He'd learned from her in the same way she'd learned from him in the way the exchange between two people who are actually paying attention tends to work both directions at once. That deflecting a true thing was its own kind of dishonesty. From me, he agreed, and from his own self, he came with things I didn't put there. She smiled at that. A full one unguarded the kind that had become more frequent since October.
Each one slightly less surprising than the last. Until now they arrived like something that had always been there just newly visible. "What does your sister think?" She asked. "About everything?"
He raised an eyebrow. "I may have mentioned something to her recently," he said. "You told your sister about me?" "She asked how things were going, and I told the truth. She's been in my life long enough that I can't convincingly pretend everything is the same when things aren't."
"What did she say?" "She said, and I am quoting, 'It's about time.' And then she asked if you were coming to Christmas, and I said, 'I didn't know yet.' And she said, 'Bring her anyway.'" Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"Your sister sounds like Jimmy," she said. "They'd be terrifying together," he said. "I've decided they should never meet." She laughed softly, conscious of the sleeping boy. They sat for a while longer in the quiet.
I've been thinking about something, she said. And I want to tell you because I'm practicing saying things before they become things I carry alone. He waited. I'm going to take January off. She said the whole month.
The company has an executive team that is more than capable of running operations for 30 days without me. And I have not taken a continuous month away in 23 years. My therapist suggested it in October. I've been finding reasons to defer it since then and running out of them. She paused.
I'm going to go to my father's hometown in Virginia. He grew up there. I've never been. A pause. He used to talk about it.
The house where he grew up, the town, a river he used to fish in with his father. He talked about it the way people talk about places that formed them. Daniel listened. I'm going to find the house. I'm going to find the river.
I'm going to take his magazines. She said each thing carefully. The way you say a plan, that is also partly a promise to yourself. And I'm going to sit with it however long it takes. That sounds right.
He said it feels necessary, she said. I've been doing the work in the office and in my apartment and with my therapist, but I think there's a piece of it that can only happen in a place. She looked at her hands. There's something I need to say to him that I never got to say. I don't know if the place is where you say it, but I think I need to try.
What are you going to say? He asked, not intrusively. He asked it the way you ask a question that you think the person already knows the answer to and needs to say out loud. She was quiet for a long moment. That he was right.
She said that he was working too hard not to build something. He was building something. Every day he was building me. And I didn't see it as the thing it was because it wasn't in a building with my name on it. Her voice was even and precise the way she said the things that cost the most and that I'm sorry and that I know it doesn't reach him the way I mean it to.
But I'm going to say it anyway because I think I think saying true things out loud has a function even when the person you're saying them to can't hear you. I think it does something in you. The saying Daniel looked at her. Yes, he said. It does.
She looked at him. You've done that, she said. With someone you lost, my father, he said, 6 years ago, I had better luck than you. We didn't leave anything unsaid. But there were still things I needed to say after, things that came up later, things I understood later that I wanted to tell him.
He paused. I say them in the garage sometimes when I'm working alone. I just say them. He was a man who understood cars. He would have had things to say about the Bronco.
Her eyes were bright. What would he have said? That the 351 Cleveland was underrated by people who didn't know better and that I should have started with the wiring instead of the transmission. A pause. He would have been right on both counts.
She smiled and blinked and looked at the sleeping boy. And when she looked back, her eyes were clear. I'll be back in February, she said. If that's all right. The Saturday visits will be here, he said.
And everything else. He looked at her steadily. Everything else will be here, he said. Take the time you need. Do the thing you need to do.