He read it twice. Then he typed back, "What did you tell him?" 3 minutes passed. Then I told him you were someone I met on a train. He said, "That's a terrible story for your grandchildren." Then he asked if you knew anything about baseball. Marcus smiled, typed, "Tell him I'm a Red Sox man, but I respect the history." Emily's response came back.
In under a minute, he said, "That's the wrong answer, but he'll let it go because at least you didn't say Yankees." Marcus set the phone down and stood there for a moment in his kitchen. Pancake batter in one hand, phone in the other. Feeling something he couldn't immediately name. It took him a second to identify it. It was lightness.
The particular lightness of a thing going well when you'd braced for it to go badly. Amara appeared in the doorway, still in her pajamas, hair going in four directions. She looked at his face. Who are you texting? A friend from work?
From the train? She padded over to the counter, climbed onto her stool, and accepted the glass of orange juice he poured without breaking eye contact. "Is it Emily?" Marcus turned slowly. "How do you know about Emily?" "Mrs. Patterson told me you talk about someone named Emily." Mrs. Patterson talks too much. "Mrs. Patterson says, "You smile different when you talk about her." Marcus poured batter onto the griddle.
He kept his back to his daughter, which she was absolutely not fooled by. I don't smile different. You're smiling right now, Amara said. And you're facing the stove, so you can't even see the message anymore. He stayed facing the stove.
Daddy, eat your breakfast. Is she nice? He flipped the pancake, watched it for a moment, then. Yeah, baby. She's really nice.
Does she make you happy? The kitchen was quiet. The pancake sizzled. Outside, December had settled over the neighborhood the way December does in Massachusetts. gray and permanent feeling like winter had always been there and always would be. Marcus thought about 10:00 phone calls and coffee orders and a photograph of himself on a train platform that he hadn't known was being taken and a woman who had looked at him and seen a builder when he'd only ever been calling himself a repair man.
Yeah, he said she does. Amara was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "With the certainty of someone who has given this considerable thought, then you should take her somewhere nice. I'll take that under consideration. Somewhere with good food," she added.
"Not just coffee on a train." He turned around then because he couldn't help it. She was sitting there eating her pancake with the expression of a woman twice her age who has arrived at an obvious conclusion and is waiting patiently for the room to catch up. He looked at her. This person, this small, extraordinary person who was more than half Renee and all her own self and something in his chest, did the thing it sometimes did when the love was too large for the moment to contain. "Your mother would have liked her," he said.
"He hadn't planned to say it." "It just arrived," Amara looked up. "Her eyes were careful." "Daddy, how do you know?" "Because she was good at seeing through things," Marcus said. "And Emily is the same way. They'd have figured each other out in about 5 minutes and then talked for 3 hours. Amara considered this.
Then she nodded once solemnly the way she nodded when something had been decided. "Okay," she said. He didn't ask what she was okaying. He understood. They met Richard Carter on a Sunday afternoon, 2 weeks before Christmas.
Marcus had not been nervous about many things in his adult life. not about job interviews, not about Rene's first hospital visit, not about his first month as a solo parent. He'd faced those things the way he faced everything by moving forward because stopping wasn't an option. But sitting in the parking lot of Massachusetts General Hospital at 1:47 p.m. on a December Sunday, he was nervous. He sat in his car for 3 minutes, checked his reflection in the visor mirror, which he never did. Fixed his collar, checked his reflection again.
His phone buzzed. Emily, he's awake and he had soup for lunch. And he told the nurse she was wrong about the infield fly rule. It's a good day. Come up.
He got out of the car. Room 414 was at the end of a corridor that Marcus navigated with a particular alertness of a man who had spent too much time in hospitals and never quite stopped reading them for bad news. He heard the television before he reached the door. Baseball predictably the low murmur of a spring training recap and then Emily's voice saying something he couldn't make out and then a deeper voice slower but still carrying authority responding. He knocked.
Come in, Emily called. He pushed the door open. Richard Carter was 71 years old and he was sick and it showed in the thinness of his arms, in the particular cural that hospitals impose, in the way he was propped against pillows. Rather than sitting upright, the way Marcus suspected was his natural state. But his eyes were sharp.
Immediately, unambiguously sharp, the eyes of a man who had been reading people for 71 years and had gotten very good at it. Emily was standing beside the bed. She looked at Marcus when he entered and some something in her face. Relief mostly the relief of someone whose two worlds are finally in the same room settled into a small smile. Dad, she said, this is Marcus.
Richard Carter looked at Marcus Hayes for a long 5 seconds. Marcus stood there and let himself be looked at. Red Sox. Richard said, yes, sir. Emily tells me you know what you're doing.
I fix things for a living. What kind of things? Train systems mostly switching panels, relay circuits, signal equipment. Richard absorbed this useful I try to be another pause. Then Richard lifted one hand slightly and gestured at the chair beside the bed.
Sit down then. I'm not going to crane my neck. Marcus sat. Emily pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. For the next hour, Richard Carter talked.
He talked about the Reds, about the 1,975 World Series, about growing up in Columbus in a family that had four boys and one television and a system for who controlled the remote that sounded, Marcus thought, remarkably similar to the systems Marcus built for himself. He talked about Emily's mother, Diane, gone since Emily was 16. breast cancer, a grief that had clearly never fully left, but that he carried with the dignity of a man who understood that love didn't end when people did. He talked about his work, 32 years, as a machinist, the last 12, at a plant in Dayton that had eventually closed, the specific pride of a man who knew how to make things with his hands. Marcus listened genuinely, fully, without the half attention. He sometimes gave social situations while the other half of his brain was running the system.