Coming from you, she said, who went from nothing to everything. I'll take that. He reached across the table and took her hand. She looked at their hands together on the kitchen table for a moment. 7 months ago, I was standing barefoot on your porch in a soaked dress, she said.
With your heels in your hand, he said. I almost threw them at you. You did throw them at me. She looked up. You caught them barely.
She was smiling now. Fully freely. The way she smiled when she'd stopped managing it. Good reflexes, she said. Good heels, he said.
They're expensive. Would have been a shame. She laughed. The real kind. And in the hallway, Dileia made a sound that meant she was listening from around the corner.
And Marcus raised his voice and said, "I can hear you, Dileia." And Dileia appeared in the doorway with her notebook pressed to her chest and said completely unapologetically, "I wasn't listening. I was just standing here in the dark," Clare said. "The hallway light is out," Dileia said. Marcus looked at Clare.
Clare looked at Marcus. "The bulb's been out for a week," he said. "It needs to be changed," Clare said. Earl keeps forgetting to bring one. I'll bring one Thursday, Clare said.
Dileia looked between them with an expression of deep satisfaction. Like she'd arranged something and was pleased with how it had come together. Okay, she said. I'm going back to homework. She went back to homework.
Marcus looked at Clare across the table with his daughter's footsteps going down the hall and the river making its low sound outside and the coffee going warm between them. And he thought about a flooded road and a barefoot woman on his porch and a sentence about the sofa that had started everything. He thought about six years of a woman standing at the edges of rooms and seeing clearly and being unseen. He thought about a dock he'd built with his own hands. He said, "Stay for dinner."
Clare said, "I brought groceries. They're in the car." He looked at her. She looked at him. I was going to make us dinner, she said.
Whether you asked or not, he stood up and went to get her groceries. She followed him to the door. Outside, the Tennessee River moved the way it always moved wide, dark, indifferent to everything except its own direction. But inside the house, every light was on. The porch took Marcus 11 months to build.
Not because it was complicated, because he kept stopping. He'd start on a Saturday morning, get 3 hours in, and then Dileia would need something, or a customer would call about a motor, or he'd sit back and look at what he'd done and realize he was building it differently than he'd originally planned, and he needed to think about that before he kept going. Earl came by twice and offered to help, and Marcus said he had it. Earl looked at the half-built frame and the lumber stacked against the side of the house and said nothing. Which was Earl's way of saying he understood.