"Grades and flowers," Earl said, pleasant. "You'll have plenty of time for both. Owen, show me that whistle outside. These jars smell like a cafeteria."
They went out through the sliding door. The carnation nodded when the air moved. Lena recapped her pen. Marcus stood there with the trash-can lid still in his hand, a stupid prop, and hated himself with a clarity that did not, in that moment, produce a sentence.
"You can finish the chart," he said.
"I know I can," Lena said. She did not look at him. "I'm going to finish it anyway."
She won second place on a Wednesday Earl was not invited to. Marcus left the awards at intermission for his shift. Denise stayed and texted him a photo of Lena with the certificate. He looked at it in the warehouse parking lot, then put the phone away, because looking did not move the heavier facts.
***
The pattern was older than Lena, which did not make it fate and did not make it an excuse. Marcus knew the difference on his good days.
He had a sister. Audrey was four years older, and she had been the student in the family when being the student still looked, to their mother, like a way out. Ruth Voss had kept Audrey's papers in a plastic bin labeled SCHOOL in Ruth's square print. Earl had called the bin "the shrine" when he wanted to be funny and "a lot of fuss over handwriting" when he was tired. Audrey got a near-perfect score on the test that mattered in their town in 1998. She wanted the state university. She had the grades. She did not have the part of the tuition the scholarship would not cover, and Earl had the part, or could have had it if the bass boat had been a smaller boat.
Marcus remembered the kitchen. Linoleum the color of weak tea. Audrey's letter on the table, the acceptance, the numbers circled in her own pen. She was trying not to smile too early. Earl read it standing up, the way he would one day read another girl's report card, already halfway to a verdict.
"State school," he said. "Big deal. Half the kids in your class will wave a letter like this around and then go wait tables. You want to go, go. I'm not emptying the account so you can sit in a lecture and come home thinking you're better than the people who paid for the chair."
Audrey's face did the thing Lena's would do later, the break behind the eyes that a proud person tries to convert into stillness. Their mother said Earl's name once, warning. Earl shrugged, suddenly bored, which was how he left a room he had wounded.
"Marcus needs a truck in two years," he said. "A boy has to have a way to get to work. Books fit in a backpack. Don't look at me like I shot a horse."
Audrey went. She worked three jobs and came home meaner and cleaner and eventually she stopped coming home. She sent Ruth cards. She sent Marcus money when Owen was born, quietly, with a note that said, "Don't tell him where this came from unless you want a speech." She did not send Earl anything, including forgiveness. At Ruth's funeral she stood on the far side of the receiving line and hugged Marcus hard enough to hurt his neck and said, into his ear, "If you have a daughter, do not make her earn her seat at the table twice."
He had said, "I won't."
He had meant it. Meaning it had been the easy part. The easy part had lasted until the furnace, and the key, and the Sundays, and the particular cowardice of a man who can lift a pallet and cannot lift his voice in his own living room because the man on the sofa once kept the lights on.