She had learned Gerald's spots. She had learned a lot of things in six weeks of Sunday dinners. She looked at Daniel. "What can I do?" She said.
"Set the table." She knew where the plates were. She knew where the glasses were. She knew that Amara's cup went on the left because Amara was left-handed, and that Daniel took his water without ice, even though no one had told her. She had just noticed and filed it away.
Daniel watched her move through his kitchen with the ease of someone who had settled into a space without trying to, and he thought, "This is what it looks like. This is the thing he had been unable to name for months because naming it would make it real and real things could be lost and he had learned what losing felt like. But he was naming it now internally standing at his own stove. This is what it looks like when someone becomes a pariel. Dinner was easy the way Sunday dinners had become easy.
Amara carrying the conversation with her current obsessions. Victoria asking follow-up questions that were either genuinely informed or genuinely curious. Daniel contributing when he had something to add and otherwise just being present in his own kitchen in a way that 6 months ago would have felt foreign and now felt like the most natural thing in the world. After dinner, after the bakery pastry, after Amara had gone through her entire illustrated guide with Victoria as her audience and received detailed feedback that she took very seriously, Amara announced she was tired and took herself to bed with the self-sufficient ease of a 9-year-old who had decided she trusted the adults to manage the rest of the evening. She stopped in the doorway.
She looked at Victoria. "You're coming next Sunday," she said. Victoria looked at Daniel briefly, then at Amara. If I'm invited, you're always invited, Amara said simply as if this were already a settled fact, which in her mind it clearly was. Good night, Victoria.
Good night, Amara. She disappeared down the hall. The apartment was quiet. Daniel poured the last of the coffee, set a cup in front of Victoria, sat down across from her at the table where Amara's drawings were still spread out between them, detailed and earnest, and full of the specific confidence of a child who believes what she makes has value. Victoria was looking at the drawings.
She's remarkable, she said. She is. She has your steadiness. The way she commits to something and stays with it. She paused.
And she has something I can't name. Something that's just hers. She's got her mother's fire, Daniel said. She'll argue a position she's already abandoned just to make sure you can defend yours. Victoria smiled.
Maya sounds like someone I would have liked. He looked at her. She would have liked you, too, he said. She had no patience for pretense. She could always tell when someone was performing versus when they were just being themselves.
He paused. She would have seen you clearly. Victoria met his eyes. "What would she have seen?" She said.