Please. The apartment was small and he knew it. A two-bedroom he shared with Amara when she wasn't at his mother's, which tonight she was. The living room had a couch and a coffee table and a bookshelf that was mostly Amara's chapter books and a few of his. An old television mounted on the wall and running along the kitchen counter, a row of Amara's drawings held in place by magnets.
Everything from dinosaurs to what appeared to be a fairly sophisticated rendering of a solar system that Darius had helped her with last spring. Victoria stopped in the doorway and looked at the drawings. Something shifted in her face. Just briefly, "Daughter," he said. "She's nine.
She's at her grandmother's tonight. She's talented. Don't tell her that her head's already the right size and I'd like to keep it that way. Victoria almost smiled. He handed her a towel, showed her the bathroom, found her a dry shirt.
The only thing in the apartment close to her size was one of his navy work shirts, which hit her mid thigh, and swallowed her shoulders, and put her silver dress in the dryer. Then he went to the kitchen and started coffee. She came out of the bathroom 20 minutes later, hair damp and loose around her face, phone clutched in one hand, his shirt hanging off one shoulder, and she sat down at his kitchen table like she'd been doing it for years. What do you do? She asked for work.
Maintenance. I supervised the overnight crew at a distribution facility on the west side. She nodded slowly. Is it good work? He considered the question seriously, the way it deserved to be considered.
Most people didn't ask that. They asked how much does it pay or do you like it, which were different questions entirely. It's honest work, he said. I know what I'm doing at the end of every shift. I fixed something or I didn't.
That's something. That's a lot actually, she said quietly. He set a mug in front of her. She wrapped both hands around it. What about you?
He asked. I run a company. Big getting there. He didn't push. She didn't elaborate.
They sat in his kitchen at 10:15 on a Thursday night drinking mediocre coffee while the rain beat against the window. And it was, and Darius recognized this was strange, one of the more comfortable silences he'd sat in for a very long time. Somewhere around 11, she fell asleep on his couch. Not slowly, not in stages. She was awake one moment and gone the next.
Like a phone whose battery finally quit, sitting upright with the coffee mug still in her hand and her head tipping forward until he crossed the room and took the mug from her fingers before she dropped it. He stood there a moment looking at her. She looked like a completely different person when she was sleeping. Whatever it was, she carried when she was awake. The vigilance, the controlled precision, the sense of a person bracing constantly for the next thing.