I left one. She looked up at him. Not the same kind, he said. My parents weren't manipulative. They were just gone.
Different situation. But I know what it means to have to decide that you're worth more than the space a family puts you in. He poured the last of the coffee into his cup and leaned against the counter. The deciding is easy. The doing is the hard part.
The doing," Clare repeated. She turned her cup in her hands. "I've been doing the doing for the last year." Quietly, "I took the job at the marina downtown, not my family's business. A different marina, a competitors, essentially, and my father hasn't spoken to me in a substantive way since."
"My mother still calls, but only to talk about Vanessa." She looked up. Last night was supposed to be me attending one more family event to demonstrate that I'm still a good daughter before I stopped attending them. And instead, you walked out. And instead, I walked through a flood in a $2,000 dress and cut my ankle on a guardrail.
A trace of something that might have been humor moved across her face. In retrospect, I think that was always how it was going to end. Her phone buzzed again. This time, neither of them looked at it. Marcus checked the water level at the dock from the window still at the boards.
Not over and came back and sat down. You said you work at a marina. Which one? Riverside Docks off the highway. Kenny Puit's place.
You know him? I do work for his customers sometimes. He's decent. He hired me as operations manager, which my father considers a betrayal on roughly three levels. She said it without bitterness.
Just fact. I like the work. I'm good at it. What does operations manager mean at a marina? It means I run the day-to-day while Kenny handles sales and relationships, slip rentals, maintenance, scheduling, vendor coordination, customer disputes.
She paused. I settled a dispute 2 weeks ago between a retired couple and a charter company over boat storage fees. And by the time it was resolved, both parties thanked me and the charter company sent a referral. She looked at him almost defiantly, like she was expecting him to be surprised. "I know how to solve problems.
I never doubted that," Marcus said. She blinked just once, like she'd braced for something that didn't come. That reaction, that small flinching readiness for someone not to believe her, told him more than the whole conversation so far. "Who doubted it?" He said.
She looked away. Clare, everyone in my family has a lane, she said to the window. Vanessa is the social one, the networker, the one who makes the family look like they belong places. My father is the businessman. My mother is the social infrastructure.