He'd gotten old, which Marcus had known intellectually but not felt until he was standing in the doorway. His father looked at him. Then he looked at Clare. Then he looked at Marcus again. You look like your grandfather, his father said.
The good one. I know, Marcus said. They sat. His father had coffee made, which meant he'd been preparing for this, which meant something. They talked not easily, not cleanly, with a lot of things skipping over, a lot of other things the way you skip stones.
Touching and moving on. Marcus's father asked about the business. Marcus told him about it. His father asked about Dileia. And Marcus showed him a photograph on his phone, and his father looked at it for a long time at his granddaughter's face and said quietly, "She's something.
She is," Marcus said. His father looked at Clare. You're good for him, Clare said. Without any performance, I try to be. His father nodded.
Good. He deserves someone who tries. On the drove home, Marcus was quiet for a long time. Clare didn't ask him to talk. She just sat there in the passenger seat with her hand on the center console, palm up, and after a while, he put his hand in hers.
"Okay," she said. "Yeah, I think I am." He went back once more in October. Alone that time. He and his father talked for 3 hours about things Marcus hadn't known he needed to say until they were coming out of him.
About what 12 felt like, about the 8 months at 19, about what it had cost him to learn how to be a man without a map. His father listened. Didn't defend himself. Didn't ask for absolution. Just listened.
The way people listen when they know they don't have the standing to do anything else. When Marcus stood up to leave, his father said, "I know I don't have the right to say, "I'm proud of you." Marcus stood at the door. He thought about it. "You can say it," he said.
"I'll decide what to do with it. His father said it." Marcus drove home with the windows down and the highway dark ahead of him and something in his chest that was lighter than it had been that morning. Not healed, not resolved, just lighter. He called Clare when he got home.
She picked up on the first ring. How'd it go? She said, "Hard," he said. "And all right, both at once?" "Yeah, that's the real kind," she said.