Patterson gave better grades to kids who sat in the front row, which Ava considered a systemic problem. Victoria listened to all of it. That was the second thing that surprised Marcus, not the polite, distracted listening of an adult tolerating a child, the real kind. She asked follow-up questions. She wanted to know what Gerald looked like.
She had an opinion about Long Division that Ava found deeply satisfying. When Ava described the penguin documentary, Victoria said quietly, "I cried at that one, too. " And Ava pointed at her like she had just confirmed a scientific theory. "I knew it was sad," Ava said. "Daddy said I was being dramatic. " "You were being dramatic," Marcus said. "The penguin was fine. " The penguin lost his egg, Daddy.
And then he found another egg. That is not the point. Ava turned to Victoria with the gravity of someone presenting evidence to a jury. Is that the point? Victoria pressed her lips together.
I'm not getting in the middle of this. That means she agrees with me, Ava told Marcus. That means she's smart enough not to take sides, Marcus said. Victoria picked up her fork. It means the spaghetti is very good and I'd like to keep eating it.
Ava grinned. It was the kind of grin Marcus knew well. The one that meant she liked someone. Not the polite grin she used on strangers or the careful grin she used on adults she wasn't sure about. The real one.
Open and certain, he watched his daughter smile at this woman he barely knew and felt something in his chest move in a direction he wasn't prepared for. He looked down at his plate and told himself it was the storm making everything feel larger than it was. After dinner, Ava helped clear the table with the particular efficiency of a child who wanted to demonstrate responsibility in front of company. And then Victoria stood at the sink and washed dishes without being asked, which stopped Marcus completely. He stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her run hot water over a pot, and he genuinely could not find a single thing to say.
"You don't have to do that," he finally managed. "I'm aware. " She didn't turn around. You cooked. You're a guest. I'm an uninvited guest who ate your food during a storm.
The least I can do is wash a pot. He came and stood beside her and picked up a dish towel and dried what she washed, and they stood there in comfortable silence for a few minutes, which was somehow stranger than conversation would have been. The storm was still rolling outside. The kitchen window above the sink had gone dark, full of rain and the occasional white branch of lightning. The walls, Victoria said.
He looked at her. What? The drawings, the paintings, the photographs. She passed him a wet bowl. They're all AA's.
Most of them. Every room I've seen. She paused. That's not an accident. Marcus dried the bowl slowly.
She's the reason the rooms exist. Victoria was quiet for a moment. Then how long have you been doing this alone? He knew what she was asking. He also knew she was asking it carefully, not out of pity, which he would have been able to feel, but out of something that seemed more like genuine weight, like the question mattered to her.
4 years, he said. Ava's mother and I split when she was four. It wasn't It wasn't ugly. It just didn't work. He set the bowl down.
She's in Seattle now. She calls. It's not we manage. And before that, before what? You said you've been at Harmon 6 years.
You were there 2 years before the split. He looked at her sideways. You do math fast. It's what they pay me for. She handed him another bowl.
I'm asking because I've been in that building for 3 weeks and I've looked at every file, every performance review, every quarterly report. And your name keeps coming up in ways that don't match your title. " Something shifted in Marcus' posture. He felt it before he processed it. The old instinct, the one he'd developed over years of navigating spaces where he was the only person who looked like him in the room. The instinct that said, "Be careful here.
Be careful what you say and how you say it. " "What kind of ways? " he asked. "The good kind," she said simply. "But that's not what I mean. I mean, how do you do it? The job, Ava, all of it.
What does a regular Tuesday look like for you? He didn't answer immediately. Not because he was suspicious of the question because he had never actually been asked it. Not in this way. Not by someone who seemed to want to know the real answer and not the polished one.
Up at 5:15, he said finally. Get Ava ready by 6:30. Drop her at school by 7:10. Work from 7:30 to 4:30 most days, sometimes later. Pick her up from Miss Carol's, cook something or heat something, help with homework, put her to bed by 8:30, then I go back over the next day's dock schedule.
He paused. That's a regular Tuesday. Victoria had stopped washing dishes. She was just standing there with her hands in the water listening. And the irregular Tuesdays, she asked.
Irregular Tuesdays are when the dock shipment is wrong and I have to fix it at 2 in the morning or Ava gets sick and I have to figure out who can take her or something breaks in the house that I have to learn how to fix on YouTube because a plumber is $300 I don't have. He realized he was talking more than he usually talked and stopped himself. It's just life. It's not just life, she said quietly. It's a lot.
Everybody's got a lot. That's true, she said. But not everybody carries it the way you do. " He looked at her, trying to figure out what she meant. She had turned back to the dishes, her face angled away from him, and he could see the line of her jaw and the way she pressed her lips together slightly when she was thinking. "You're different here," he said.
She glanced at him. Different how? At work, you're He stopped, chose the word carefully. Controlled. Is that a complaint?
It's an observation. She handed him the last pot. I spent 8 years being told I was too emotional to be taken seriously in a room full of men who were celebrated for being passionate. You learn to control it or you lose the room. She turned off the water and then you walk into someone's kitchen at 8:00 on a Tuesday night and you realize the control is still there even when you don't need it.
He held the pot and thought about that. "Is that hard? " he asked. She dried her hands on the dish towel he was holding. "Some days more than others. " Ava appeared in the doorway in her star pajamas holding a book. "Can Miss Hart read to me? " Marcus opened his mouth.
Victoria said, "What's the book? " Ava held it up. Charlotte's Web. Victoria looked at Marcus. Something passed between them that wasn't quite a conversation and wasn't quite a question. He gave a small nod.
He didn't even think about it. It just happened. And Victoria said, "Sure. " And followed Ava down the hall. Marcus stood in the kitchen alone holding a pot he'd already dried, listening to his daughter's voice explaining to a woman she'd met 3 hours ago exactly why Charlotte was the most important character in the entire book, and why people who disagreed were simply wrong. He put the pot away, stood at the kitchen window.