I'd rather know about her. He looked at the table. She was louder than me. Most people are, but Diane especially. She laughed from her whole body.
She had an opinion about everything. And she delivered opinions like she was doing you a favor by sharing them, which she genuinely believed she was. Something moved through his expression. complicated integrated ache of love that's learned to coexist with loss. She was a first grade teacher. She taught for six years and she knew every single one of her students by the end of the first week.
Not just their names, their things, their specific fears, their specific enthusiasms. She said, "Kids come in already fully formed and the job was to find the form." Natalie was very quiet. She sounds like someone who would have been very easy to love. She was very easy to love.
She was also very clear about what she needed and completely uninterested in pretending otherwise, which sometimes was a lot to keep up with and which I would give anything to navigate again. He looked up. She would have a lot of opinions about you. Good opinions or interrogating opinions, both. Simultaneously, she would have asked you 50 questions in the first 20 minutes and then turned to me and said, "She's exactly what I thought."
And refused to explain what she meant. That sounds like how Ava operates. It's entirely where Ava got it from. A pause. I think she'd be glad.
I think she'd want. She was very clear that my life didn't stop with her. She said that when things got bad near the end, she made me promise. His voice went quiet. I haven't always known what to do with a promise like that.
It's a hard kind of permission to carry. Natalie put her hand on the table between them, not reaching for his hand, just there, present. Thank you for telling me that, she said. He looked at her hand on the table. Then he put his hand next to hers, not touching, adjacent.
They sat like that for a while. Two people in a room that didn't wobble and didn't quite feel like home yet. in the particular companionship of people who have both learned that lost doesn't disqualify you from wanting. It just changes what wanting costs. January arrived with the brutal honesty of January cold, stripped down, no holiday warmth left to borrow against, and brought with it the thing that Caleb had been quietly bracing for, without fully admitting it. His brother Darnell came to visit.
Darnell Morrison was 40 years old, 6'2, and constitutionally incapable of anything resembling subtlety. He arrived on a Saturday afternoon with a duffel bag, a bottle of bourbon, and the specific energy of an older brother who has been receiving carefully edited phone call information for 3 months and has finally decided to to come see the unedited version in person. He walked into the apartment, said hello to Ava, who immediately took him to see her drawings and explained the Gerald situation in full. And when Ava disappeared to her room to retrieve a specific drawing she needed Darnell to see, Dart turned to Caleb and said, "Where is she?" Caleb was getting glasses from the cabinet.
Who? Caleb? She's not here. She's at a board thing today. But she's been here.