She thinks I chose the company over the family. Did you? I chose not to slow down when she needed me to, which might be the same thing. She paused. I've been thinking about calling her.
What's stopping you? I don't know what to say. You could start with sorry. She looked at him. Just like that.
Just like that. The apology doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be real. She was quiet for a moment, turning her coffee cup slowly in both hands. Then she said, "You make difficult things sound simple.
I make complicated things sound practical. That's different." Is it? Yeah. Simple means easy.
Practical means it's hard, but here's how you do it anyway. She looked at him for a long moment with an expression. He couldn't fully read something between surprise and recognition. The face of a person encountering an idea they've been circling for a long time without finding the right words for it. I want to ask you something, she said.
Go ahead. The morning in your apartment, the maintenance logs, the conveyor belt this morning, she kept her eyes on him. Is this Do you want this to be a professional relationship? The directness of it was so clean it almost took his breath away. No games, no angle, just the question laid flat on the table between them.
He matched it. No, he said, but I need you to understand something first. Tell me. I've been the single father in the room. I've been the maintenance worker in the room.
I've been the black man in the room where decisions get made about things that affect people who look like me by people who've never stood where I stand. He held her gaze. I don't perform gratitude. I don't perform anything. Whatever this is, it has to be honest or it has to be nothing.
She didn't flinch. I grew up with a father who performed everything. She said, "Happiness, success, love, all of it performed for an audience that was never satisfied. I have spent my entire adult life building something real because I watched him build something hollow." She paused.
"Honest or nothing is exactly the only deal I know how to make." He looked at her across the small table in the small coffee shop two blocks from her facility and he thought this woman is going to complicate everything. He also thought good okay she said and neither of them said anything more about it that afternoon because that was the kind of thing you say once and then carry quietly until you know what it means. She made it to her 2:00 meeting. He drove back to the Westside facility and worked his shift and picked up Amara from his mother's at 7:00.