And when Amara asked why he was smiling at nothing during dinner, he said he'd had a good day at work. Amara looked at him the way 9-year-olds look at adults who are obviously lying about the boring reason for something. Was it a girl? She said, "Eat your vegetables. That means yes, Amara.
I'm just saying." She stabbed a piece of broccoli with theatrical suspicion. Marcus says when dads smile at nothing, it's usually a girl or a sports thing. And you don't watch sports. I watch sports.
Name one team. He pointed at her plate. She ate her broccoli, still looking at him with the satisfied expression of a person who had won. He went to sleep that night thinking about what Victoria had said about her sister and about apologies that didn't have to be perfect, just real. And whether that was advice he had given her or something he had needed to hear himself for reasons he was only starting to acknowledge.
It took him until 2:00 a.m. To realize the reasons. Then he lay in the dark for a while with that knowledge, which was the kind of knowledge that rearranges things when you finally let it in. And eventually he slept. 2 days later on a Friday, his phone rang at 8:15 in the evening.
He was reading to Amara. They were three chapters into a book about a girl who discovers she can talk to plants which Amara had selected because as she explained it was scientifically plausible and he almost didn't answer. He answered I called her. Victoria said no hello again but this time it felt different. Not business just urgency of a different kind.
My sister I called her. He closed the book gently. Amara looked up at him with one eyebrow raised, which was a thing she had learned from him and deployed against him constantly. "Hold on," he said into the phone. To Amara 10 minutes, "Bug, I'll be right back."
Amara's other eyebrow went up to join the first. He stepped into the hallway. "What happened?" He said. She cried.
Victoria said. Her voice was doing something complicated. She picked up on the second ring and I said, "I was sorry." And she started crying before I even finished the sentence. She said she said she'd been waiting for me to call for 2 years.
2 years, Darius. She was just waiting. He leaned against the hallway wall. How do you feel? Like an idiot.
A pause. Like a relieved idiot. That's a good combination. We talked for an hour and a half. He heard her exhale.