Clare never asked about it. That was the thing. She saw it every time she came over the frame going up slowly. The stack of boards decreasing week by week. And she never once said, "When are you going to finish that?"
Or "You've been working on that a long time." She just saw it the way she saw everything about Marcus. With patience and without pressure. That was how he knew she understood what it was. He finished it on a Thursday in September, exactly 1 year and 12 days after the flood.
He didn't tell anyone. He just came in from the last hour of work with sawdust on his hands and sat at the kitchen table while Clare finished cooking. She cooked on Thursdays now had for 8 months. It had become one of the rhythms of their life together without being negotiated into one. And Dileia was doing homework at the other end of the table.
And the house smelled like garlic and something with rosemary. "And Marcus looked at the two of them in his kitchen and felt something in his chest so full it was almost pressure." "Porch is done," he said. Dileia looked up from her homework. "Clare turned from the stove."
"Neither of them said anything for a second." "Done, done," Dileia said. "Done, done." Dileia dropped her pencil and was out the back door before he'd finished the sentence. Marcus heard her footsteps cross the new boards, heard her test the swing he'd hung from the crossbeam.
Heard it creek and then hold. Marcus, Clare said from the stove. Yeah, come taste this. He went and tasted it. Rosemary chicken.
She'd gotten the timing right this time. She'd overshot it twice in June and under by 10 minutes in July, which she'd been mildly furious about because Clare Bennett did not like doing something imprecisely once she'd decided to learn it. That's good, he said. She took the spoon back. I know.
Don't sound surprised. I'm not surprised. You made that face. I don't have a face. You have exactly one face, and I know all of its variations.
She turned back to the stove. Is the railing solid? It'll hold an elephant. Good. Because Dileia is going to hang off it every single day from now until she leaves for college.
The accuracy of that sentence, the casualness of it, the easy certainty that Dileia's future was something Clare was already factored into. Hit Marcus quietly and directly the way the honest things always did. Yeah, he said. She is. They ate on the porch that night.