After he left, the apartment smelled like peaches and cologne. Yvette stood at the sink a long time, washing a plate that was already clean. Marcus dried beside her. She said, "Your uncle sees me more clearly than I like sometimes." Marcus said, "He still sent peaches." She smiled sideways. "He did." Zora ate a peach over the sink so the juice would not reach the floor and announced that judgmental pigeons would probably like peaches too. The afternoon became ordinary again, which was the point.
On a sticky Monday near summer's start, Zora found Marcus on the balcony with a book Ms. Okello had recommended for summer, a novel about a girl who mapped a city by walking until the streets made a kind of sense. Zora sat beside him with her old phone and showed him a photo she had taken of a pigeon that looked, somehow, judgmental.
"Mom asked me this morning if I ever wished I still had the new one," Zora said.
Marcus waited. Heat rose off the parking lot below in soft waves.
"I said no. I said mine works and yours works and that is the point. She got quiet. Then she said she was glad I could say no without performing. I think that means she is still worried she made me into a saint."
"You're not a saint."
"I know. Saints don't like pigeon photos." Zora leaned her head against his arm for a second, then straightened because a kid from the third floor was watching. "Are we okay?"
Marcus looked at the city, the same towers that had softened the kitchen that night in January, now hard and bright in summer glare. "Yeah. We're okay. Mom and me are… something. Not done. Not broken the way the phone was. We're practicing."
Zora accepted that. She had always been good at accepting unfinished things without demanding they pretend to be finished. She took another pigeon photo. This one looked less judgmental and more bored.