Earl nodded like that was an acceptable answer. He went back to the workbench. Marcus stood there another moment. She had looked at him through that windshield, and the look had meant something specific, something he could read even now with the lot empty and the light going and the river making its low, wide sound behind him. It had meant, "This isn't over."
It had meant, "I'll be there when you get there." And Marcus Reed, standing in his own lot with his own river behind him, understood that the water had dropped and the road had opened and the emergency was technically finished. But the real thing, whatever it was, whatever it was becoming, had only just begun. He waited 6 days, not because he was playing a game. Not because Earl's comment about scared versus smart was still sitting in his chest, though it was.
He waited because he'd meant what he said. He needed to know that whatever Clare felt, she was feeling it from her own ground, not from the adrenaline of a flood and a family confrontation and two days of compressed honesty in a house cut off from everything else. He spent those six days working. He finished the pontoon motor. He took on a hull repair for a charter company two slips down from Kenny Puit's Marina.
He picked Dileia up from his sisters on Sunday. And on the drive back, she talked the whole two hours about a movie she'd watched three times and a girl at school named Josephine who was simultaneously her best and her worst enemy. And Marcus listened and asked questions and felt the familiar specific weight of love that comes with having an 8-year-old trust you with everything, including the complicated social drama of third grade. Sunday night, Dileia was in bed and Marcus was at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and his phone face up in front of him and he looked at Clare's number for a while. He picked up the phone.
He put it back down. He picked it up again. He called. It rang three times. He thought it was going to voicemail and was already deciding what to say when she answered.
"I was wondering when you'd call," she said. "6 days," he said. I counted. He heard her move, the sound of her sitting somewhere. Settling.
Are you at home? My apartment? Yes. How are you? A pause.
Not the uncertain kind. The kind where someone is being careful about honesty. I had a conversation with my parents on Wednesday, she said. At their house, sat at the dining room table, which is where my family does everything important. And I said most of what needed saying, a pause.
My father listened more than I expected. My mother cried, but I think it was actually real this time. She stopped. Vanessa wasn't there. She didn't come.
She called and said she needed more time before she could sit in a room with me and be useful, which is the most self-aware thing I've heard her say in years. So, I counted it as progress. Marcus turned his coffee cup on the table. "And your father? Where did he land?"
He said. Clare was quiet for a moment, choosing her words. He said that he'd spent 30 years treating me like the one who didn't need anything because I never asked. He said he thought that was my preference. A small bitter edge in her voice.