And Elena covered her with a jacket someone had left on a nearby table. Zoe held on admirably until about 4:30 and then sat down next to Marcus and leaned against his arm with the weight of the fully exhausted. "I like today," Zoe said to no one in particular. "Yeah," Marcus said. Kesha says sharks are better than dinosaurs, Zoe said. ""She's wrong, but she's nice. "" "High praise," Elena said from across the table.
"You're nice, too," Zoe said to Elena with the frank generosity of a child who has decided something and is telling you about it. You're nice and you're tall and I like your earrings. Elena touched the small hoops at her ears. "Thank you, Zoe. " "My dad thinks you're nice, too," Zoe said. Marcus looked at the sky briefly.
"Does he? " Elena said carefully., not looking at Marcus. He gets weird when he's around you though, Zoe continued with tremendous commitment to this topic. Like the weird he gets when he's nervous. He got the same weird before my school play. Zoe, Marcus said, "I'm just saying what I observed," Zoe said, using the word observed with the confidence of someone who had heard it recently and was deploying it at every opportunity.
Elena pressed her lips together. Her shoulders were shaking. "I apologize for my child," Marcus said. "Don't," Elena said. She looked at Zoe.
You're very observant. I know, said Zoe. Do you think you could observe the inside of your dad's truck for about 10 minutes while the grown-ups talk? Zoe looked at her father. He gave her the look.
She climbed off the bench, collected her jacket with dignity, and walked toward the parking lot, pausing once to look back at them with the expression of a scientist, returning to a lab. She is confident we'll produce results. Elena watched her go, then said quietly. "She's exactly like you. " "God help her," Marcus said. "No, it's good. " Elena said she's direct.
She knows what she sees. She doesn't spend a lot of time pretending things aren't what they are. A pause. You used to be like that before everything. I think I forgot.
Marcus said you're remembering. Elena said she was looking at the table when she said it. Not at him, but it landed the way she meant it to the community center was emptying around them. Torres was breaking down the grill. Two officers Marcus didn't know were folding tables on the other side of the lawn.
Kesha was still asleep in her chair, one arm dangling. Her plastic sheriff's star slightly crooked. "I want to ask you something," Marcus said. He said it before he could reconsider, which was the only reliable way he had found to actually ask difficult things. "Okay," Elena said.
"The man in Douglas County," he said. "The one who wanted to marry you," Elena looked up. Her expression shifted from relaxed to careful, but she didn't shut down. ""What about him? " Was he a good man? " Marcus asked. "Yes," she said. He was a genuinely good man.
Stable. He would have been good to me. "Why didn't you say yes? " A long pause. Elena looked at her hands. Because when he asked me, she said slowly.
I sat there and I thought about the word yes and what it meant. Permanent, chosen, someone who looks at you and says, you are the person I am building my life with. And I am sure about that. She paused and I realized I didn't feel sure. I felt settled.
I felt comfortable and safe and like it was probably the right practical decision, but I didn't feel sure. "And sure matters to you? " Marcus said, ""Sure is the only thing that matters to me. "" She said, "I watched my mother spend 30 years loving a man who was home 40% of the time. " She called it love. I think she did love him. But I also think she spent 30 years being the woman who stayed while he kept going and she called that devotion and I think it was also just loss that she had normalized. Elena looked up.
I promised myself I would not choose a half thing and call it a whole thing. Marcus was quiet for a moment. "And what made you unsure about him specifically? " Elena looked at him for a long time. "That's a question you already know the answer to," she said. "I want to hear you say it," Marcus said quietly.
"Honestly? " She held his gaze. When he asked me to marry him, she said, the first thing I thought, the very first thing before I thought about anything else was that it didn't feel like it was supposed to feel. And then I thought, how do you know what it's supposed to feel like, Elena? And then I thought she stopped. Elena Marcus said, ""I thought about you. "" She said, "That's the truth.
I thought about what it had felt like to sit next to you in a parking lot at 17 years old and feel like the world made sense when it usually didn't. And I thought about how I had been waiting for something to feel that way again. " And it hadn't. She exhaled and I told him I needed more time. And 3 months later, I told him I couldn't. And 6 months after that, I transferred back to Cedar Falls.
The truth of it sat between them in the quiet of the emptying community center. Marcus felt the weight of it. Not the gratifying weight, the responsible weight. The weight of knowing someone had been affected by your absence in ways that shaped the course of their life. That was not a trophy.
That was a thing to be handled carefully. "Elena," he said,, I have to tell you something, and I need you to hear it clearly. "I'm listening," she said., "I am not the boy you remembered. " He said, "I know you know that, but I need you to hear what I mean when I say it. I'm not the boy you were waiting for. I'm not the promise from graduation night.
I can't give you back what those 15 years took. And if you're looking for the version of us that existed at 17, I can't be that. That person doesn't exist anymore. " Elena watched him carefully. What I can be, Marcus continued, is who I am right now. A man with a daughter who uses the word observe like a weapon.
A man who went to therapy and is still going and is still figuring out what he wants his life to look like. A man who carries some things he hasn't finished working through. That's what's available, not the memory. Me. Elena was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said, "Marcus, do you think I drove back to Cedar Falls because I wanted the 17-year-old boy? " "I don't know what you wanted. " He said, "Honestly, I wanted to find out if the thing I remembered was real. " She said, "The feeling, not the specific memory of who we were, but whether the person who made me feel that way still existed in some form. Whether there was something there that was actually true or whether I had been chasing a ghost for 15 years. She paused. And now I've sat across from you in a diner. I've watched you with your daughter.