Be braver than any child should have to be. Pride and grief occupying the same square inch of her face. Marcus sat back, looked at the ceiling for a moment, thought about his wife, thought about the house he rattled around in that still had her reading chair in the corner because he hadn't found the courage to move it. Thought about how many Saturdays he'd spent in this shop because it was easier than being anywhere else. He looked at Ava.
Saturday, he said. Ava's expression didn't change, but her hands stopped gripping the edge of the chair. "What time does it start?" he asked Naomi. Naomi blinked like she hadn't quite believed it would happen. 9:00.
I'll be there at 8:45, he said. He stood up, picked up his coffee. And Ava, the girl looked at him. Next time you want to ask me something something," he said. "Ask me yourself.
You don't need to send your mother out in the rain." For the first time that evening, Ava Carter almost smiled. He didn't sleep much that night. He sat in the kitchen after midnight with the light above the stove on just that one light, the small yellow one, the same one. His wife used to turn on when she came down for water at 2:00 a.m. And didn't want to wake the whole house. He sat with his coffee gone cold and thought about what Saturday was going to feel like.
I thought about standing in a school gymnasium surrounded by little girls and their fathers. Real fathers, legal fathers, the kind whose names were on birth certificates and being the one who wasn't supposed to be there. The impostor. The man playing a role for one afternoon just until sunset. He told himself it was simple.
It was one day, one event. He'd done harder things. Then he thought about the way Ava had said, "What if you said no and the way she'd said, "I've been okay before." And he knew something he didn't want to know. This was not going to be simple because a child like Ava, a child who shows up quietly and asks for nothing and builds her whole story of safety around a man who gives her a laminated badge and explains braines that child doesn't need a father for one afternoon. She needs someone who stays.
And Marcus didn't know yet whether he was capable of that, whether whatever was left in him after everything he'd buried was enough to be that for someone. He sat in the kitchen under that one yellow light, and he thought about showing up at 8:45, and somewhere beneath all the doubt and all the careful, reasonable fear, something shifted. Something that had been very still for a very long time started moving. He told himself it was just one day. He had no idea.
It was already so much more than that. Saturday came faster than Marcus expected. He was up at 5:30. Not because he set an alarm. He just woke up the way he always did on days when something was going to happen that he couldn't fully control.
Eyes open, ceiling staring back at him, the quiet of the house pressing in from every direction. He lay there for a few minutes, didn't move, just listened to the sound of nothing, and tried to remember the last time he'd gone somewhere on a Saturday morning that wasn't this shop or a hardware store or a funeral. He couldn't. He got up, made coffee, stood at the kitchen window while it brewed, and watched the sky go from black to gray to the particular shade of blue that comes just before the sun commits to showing up. He thought about calling it off.
Thought about texting Naomi. He had her number now from when she'd given it to him Thursday evening before she and Ava left the garage and saying something reasonable. Something about how he'd thought it over and maybe this wasn't the right call for anyone. He picked up his phone, set it back down, drank his coffee. At 7:15, he went upstairs and put on the good clothes.
Not a suit. He didn't own one that still fit right. And showing up in an ill-fitting suit to a school gymnasium felt like the wrong kind of trying too hard. He put on dark slack, a pressed white shirt, and the charcoal gray jacket his sister had given him two Christmases ago that he'd worn exactly once to a church anniversary dinner, and hung back up with the tags, still feeling new. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror for a long moment.
He didn't look like a father. He didn't know what he looked like actually. A man getting ready for something he didn't fully understand and couldn't quite back out of. That was the honest answer. He grabbed his keys at 8:15 and was out the door.
He pulled up to Naomi's house on Delwood at 8:37. He sat in the truck for about 90 seconds, which was long enough to feel foolish about it, and then he got out and walked up to the front door and knocked. Naomi opened it almost immediately, like she'd been watching for the truck from the window. She was dressed simply, dark jeans, a cream colored blouse, hair pulled back. She looked like a woman who had spent a long time deciding what to wear and had finally chosen the thing that said, "I am not trying to be more than this moment requires." "You came," she said.
Just those two words. But the way she said them with a kind of relief that she was clearly trying to hold back and not quite managing told him everything about what the night before had looked like in this house. I said I would, Marcus said. She nodded, stepped back. She's almost ready.
She's been ready for an hour actually, but she keeps Naomi glanced back over her shoulder and lowered her voice. She keeps checking the badge. Marcus felt something move in his chest. The mechanic badge. She polished it, Naomi said with a dish towel last night and again this morning.
She's wearing it. Marcus didn't trust himself to respond to that right away. He cleared his throat. Okay. And then Ava appeared at the end of the hallway.
She had on a yellow dress with white sneakers and her hair in two puffs and pinned to the left side of her dress. Catching the light from the front window was the little laminated badge he'd made her six weeks ago that said junior mechanic Johnson's auto. She stopped when she saw him like she needed a second to make sure he was real. You're early, she said. 8:45, Marcus said like I told you.
Ava looked at her mother then back at Marcus. Then she did something he didn't expect. She walked straight up to him and held out her hand. Formal, deliberate, like she'd decided this was the proper way to start the day. He shook it.
"Okay," Ava said. "Let's go." And Marcus almost laughed for the first time in a very long time. They drove to the school in his truck. Naomi in the front passenger seat. Ava in the back with her backpack on her lap, looking out the window with the focused expression of someone traveling towards something important.
Nobody said much. Marcus had the radio on low. An old Marvin Gay song came through the speakers and Naomi glanced at him sideways with a small surprised look like she hadn't expected that. "My wife's playlist," he said without thinking. Then wondered if he should have said it, but Naomi just nodded.