"I remember the check. I remember the key. I remember every Sunday I let you talk to Lena like she was a show-off for knowing things. You want the money back, we'll talk about a number. You don't get my daughter as interest."
Earl stood then. He was not as tall as Marcus, and the difference bothered him more in that moment than it had bothered him at any holiday. He smoothed the front of his shirt, a tidy gesture, restoring the man who picked up prescriptions and called it care.
"I don't want your payment plan. I wanted a family that didn't flinch every time I walked in. I wanted a grandson who could take a gift without a committee meeting. I wanted a granddaughter who could be proud without making it a referendum on me. You think I hate her. I don't hate her. I hate what you're turning her into, which is a person who will measure every man she meets against a row of A's and find him short, starting with you."
"She brought you a paper," Marcus said. "You could have said good. That was the whole job. Good, Lena. One syllable. You couldn't spend it."
"It wouldn't have been enough for her," Earl said. "One good and she'd need a trophy. I call it not feeding a fire."
"You liked hurting her," Marcus said, and the sentence surprised him with its plainness. "I saw your face. It wasn't a lesson. You enjoyed the second rip. Don't lie to me in front of my mother's picture."
Earl's eyes went, unwilling, to the portrait of Ruth's quilt and the sleeping baby. His jaw worked. For a moment Marcus thought something true might come out, something small enough to be real, an admission that the enjoyment had frightened even him. It didn't. Earl bent, not to the report card, but to gather his pharmacy bag, then remembered the bag was Denise's and left it. He took his keys from the table. The fifty remained where Owen had set it, half curled, Grant looking at the ceiling.
"Don't come next Sunday," Marcus said.
Earl paused with his hand on the storm door. The smirk tried again, thinner.
"We'll see what your wife says when she hears you picked a mood over a roof."
"She'll say I was late," Marcus said. "She'll be right. Don't come next Sunday anyway."
Earl left. The storm door slapped the way it had when he arrived. His truck started on the second try, a familiar cough. Marcus stood in the living room with his hands empty and his pulse in his ears and did not feel like a man who had won a fight. He felt like a man who had finally locked a door he had been holding open with his foot, and who could still see, on the carpet, the proof of how long the foot had been there.
***
He picked up the two halves of the report card because leaving them for Lena to find would have been another kind of lateness.
The tear was ugly. Earl had not aimed it between columns. Lena's last name split. The A's survived mostly on one half, the comments from teachers on the other. A note from the math teacher, Mrs. Adjei, was bisected: "Lena doesn't just get the answer, she—" and then the rest was on the other piece, "shows the younger students how to check their work without making them feel small." Marcus held the halves together in the air until the sentence reunited. His eyes burned. He did not give himself the luxury of a long stand there. He set the pieces on the kitchen table, one above the other, and put the salt shaker on them so the fan from the heating vent would not blow them to the floor. The fifty he left on the coffee table. Moving it felt like deciding whose it was. He was not ready to decide that, and Owen was the one who had put it down, and Owen deserved to find it where he had left it.