She's careful, Henry said. She's more than careful, Marcus said. She built herself into someone who doesn't need anyone, which is impressive. And also, he stopped. Lonely, Henry said quietly.
Yeah, Henry breathed once audibly. Her mother left when Emily was 11. Not dramatically. Not for another man or a great catastrophe. She simply decided that the life she had wasn't the one she wanted, and she built a different one. a pause.
She was not cruel about it, which in some ways made it harder. You can make sense of cruelty. You can find reasons for it, but someone leaving calmly with explanation while you're standing there at 11 years old trying to understand why you aren't enough reason to stay. He stopped. Emily decided that day that she was never going to need anyone so much that losing them would do that to her again.
The words sat in the Georgia night air like something solid. She's been very successful at it, Henry said. And the sadness in his voice was enormous and quiet and completely controlled the way old grief becomes when you've carried it long enough that it's just part of how you're built. Until recently, Marcus said a long pause. Until recently, Henry agreed.
Marcus didn't say anything else about that. Neither did Henry. Some conversations reached the true thing and then properly stopped. The farmhouse will be done by March, Marcus said. I'm going to start on the exterior this week.
Good, Henry said. Take your time. You keep saying that because I mean it. A pause. And then something shifted in Henry's voice became lighter, almost ry.
Also, because Emily keeps going out there on weekends, and the longer the project takes, the more weekends that is. And I'm a patient man when patience is working in the right direction. Marcus laughed. Actually laughed. Not the controlled exhale he usually managed, but a real one.
You're not as subtle as you think you are, Marcus said. I'm considerably more subtle than you think I am, Henry said with great dignity. Good night, Marcus. Good night, Henry. He hung up.
He sat in the dark for a while longer. Then he went inside, checked on Lily, stood in the doorway of her room for a moment watching her sleep with that sprawled complete abandonment that children brought to sleep and adults spent their whole lives trying to find again and went to bed. 3 weeks passed. The farmhouse came back in sections. East wing re-roofed.
Interior walls stripped to the original plaster and repaired. kitchen floor relayed with reclaimed lumber that Marcus had sourced from a demolition site in Mon and hauled back himself because it matched the original boards exactly in grain and age. The porch rebuilt from the frame out the new boards treated and fitted with the precision that made Marcus' work recognizable to anyone who knew what to look for. Emily came out on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays. She stopped pretending to be there, only to check the project's progress sometime in the third week when she arrived with a paper bag containing two coffees and a specific pastry from a bakery in Atlanta that Marcus happened to have mentioned once off-handedly that he liked. She'd driven 40 minutes out of her way for it.
She set it on the porch rail without ceremony and sat down in the folding chair she'd started keeping in the back of her car. Marcus looked at the pastry, looked at her. You went to Atlanta first, he said. I had a morning meeting, she said in the tone of someone closing a discussion. Marcus did not close it.
Emily, she looked at him. Don't make it strange, she said. I'm not making it strange. I'm making it accurate. She held his gaze with that expression, the one that was trying to be composed, and was losing ground on it.
I know what it is, she said. Her voice was quieter. I'm not I'm not confused about what this is. What is it? He said, not pressuring, genuinely asking the way he asked construction questions because he needed to know the actual answer in order to do the work correctly.
Emily looked at the restored porch, the new boards, the clean lines of work done right. Something I haven't done in a long time, she said. Something I decided I wasn't going to do again. and she looked at him and apparently I was wrong. Marcus picked up his coffee, took a sip, set it down. "All right," he said.
"All right," she repeated. "All right," he said again. "That's enough for now." She looked at him for a long moment. Something worked its way through her expression. "Surprise, and then something else, something more complicated. the particular relief of someone who had been braced for a conversation to move faster than they were ready for and discovered it wasn't going to.
"You're not going to push," she said. "No," he said. "Why not?" He looked at the work in front of him at the house that was coming back to itself slowly in the right order. Each piece waiting for the piece before it to be solid before adding more weight. "Because some things can't be rushed," he said.
You push before it's ready and you compromise the whole structure. He picked up his tools. I know how to build things, right? She was quiet. I know, she said softly.
That's the whole problem. He looked at her. How is that a problem? Because it makes it very hard to stay scared of you, she said. He held her gaze for one long moment.