He turned back to the stage leg and tightened the bolt with more force than it strictly required. He had a decision to make. He just wasn't ready to make it yet. The days after the setup morning were the kind Darius knew how to manage. He kept his head down.
He worked. He picked Nia up from school, made dinner, checked her homework, listened to her practice her song, and told himself that whatever he had felt standing in that church hall with a wrench in his hand was nothing that required any particular attention. He was good at that. He had been good at it for 4 years, but something had shifted in the way he moved through his own routine, and Ellis noticed it the way Ellis noticed everything. Quietly, without comment, filing it away until the moment was right.
It started small. Darius began taking 5 extra minutes before leaving for the diner in the morning, straightening his collar, switching to a cleaner jacket. He lingered longer over his coffee at Maple Bell, letting the cup go nearly cold before he stood to leave. And on the mornings when Mara came to refill it without being asked, he found reasons to say something about the weather, about the road work on Clement Street, just to keep the conversation alive a little longer. Ellis watched all of it from a distance and said nothing for almost 2 weeks.
Then one afternoon, while they were both in the second bay working a rear axle job, Ellis put down his impact driver and said, without preamble, "You want to tell me what's going on with you? Or do you want me to tell you?" Darius kept his eyes on the axle. "Nothing's going on." "You ironed your work shirt this morning. It was wrinkled, Darius. You have worn wrinkled shirts to this shop for 4 years, and never once cared.
Ellis leaned against the quarter panel and crossed his arms. It's Mara. Darius didn't answer. Ellis let the silence sit there, which was somehow worse than if he had kept talking. Finally, Darius set down his tool and straightened up.
It doesn't matter what it is. Nia's already attached. Every time we leave that diner, she asks when we're coming back. I'm not doing something that's going to blow up and leave my daughter standing in the middle of it. Ellis was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, I hear you. But I want you to think about something. What you're most scared of isn't that Nia gets hurt. It's that she won't. It's that it'll work.
And then you'll have to figure out what to do with that. He picked up his tool again. Not every person who walks into your daughter's life is there to replace her mother. Some people come just to help the two of you keep going. Darius didn't respond, but he thought about it that night after Nia was asleep.
He sat at the kitchen table and looked at the chair across from him, the one Renee used to sit in, the one Nia now claimed as hers. And he tried to locate the exact boundary between honoring the past and hiding inside it. He couldn't find it. That was the problem. The day of the fair arrived cold and bright, the kind of November morning where the sky was completely clear and the air had real weight to it.
Darius was at the church hall by 7:30, 2 hours before the doors opened, and he worked without stopping. He fixed the remaining stage issue, a center brace that had worked itself loose overnight. He ran new cable ties along the light rig, tested every connection twice, then moved to the game booths, where three folding tables had warped hinges that wouldn't lock flat. He fixed those. Someone needed the sound system repositioned.
He did that, too. At one point, Nia appeared at his elbow in her angel costume, one wing listing noticeably to the left, and he spent 10 minutes carefully re-threading the elastic strap through the back panel while she stood very still and gave him detailed instructions he hadn't asked for. By 11:00, the hall was full and Darius had not eaten anything since a piece of toast at 6:00 in the morning. He hadn't noticed. There was always something else that needed doing.
He was resetting a string of lights along the back wall when he heard footsteps behind him. And then Mara was beside him, holding a plate in one hand and a cup of lemonade in the other. "Sit down for 10 minutes," she said. "I'm almost done with this section. The lights will still be there in 10 minutes." She held the plate out, a full plate of the hot food the church ladies had been cooking since early morning.
There was a smaller plate balanced on top of it, covered with a napkin. "That one's for Nia, for after her performance." Darius looked at the plates, then at Mara. "I'm not really hungry." Mara set both plates on the nearest table with calm efficiency. Then she turned and looked at him directly, not with impatience, not with the soft deflection she sometimes used with difficult customers at the diner, but with the clear, direct gaze of someone who meant exactly what they were about to say. "You can be strong in front of this whole town if you want to," she said.