“Most people don’t throw it.”
“Then most people are wasting a possession.”
They stood under the dead bulb and talked for twelve minutes about a bad call, a song in the gym playlist, and the fact that Marcus had to be on the road by five in the morning. When she asked what he drove, he said, “Vans. Not mine to show off.” She heard modesty. She would later learn it was also a boundary.
He walked her to her car without making the walk a performance. He did not lean on the door. He said, “If you want, I’ll text you that I got home. You said your dad worries.” She had not said that, not exactly. She had said her dad was a worrier about the concept of daughters after dark. Marcus had translated it into a courtesy. She gave him her number. On the drive home she smiled at the windshield like a person who had been handed a small correct thing.
The texts were ordinary and therefore rare. He did not send paragraphs of smoke. He sent: Home. You good? Two days later he sent a photograph of a sunrise over a warehouse lot with the caption This is what five looks like. Don’t romanticize it. She romanticized it anyway, not the lot, but the fact that he had thought to show her his actual morning.
They went for pizza on a Wednesday because Wednesdays were the hole in his route sheet. He paid. She argued. He said, “You can get the next one if there is a next one.” There was a next one. In a used bookstore he pulled an engineering text off a shelf, checked the price, and put it back with a respect that made her curious.
“You read that stuff?”
“I try to. Fall’s going to be a different kind of tired.”
She waited for the school’s name. He said, “I’ll tell your father myself, if I ever get that far.” She kissed him in the parking lot for that sentence, quickly, and then pretended she had not made it an event.
By March she had sat at his aunt’s table and eaten baked chicken under the eye of a woman who missed nothing and decided, after one glass of tea, that Sarah was not playing with her nephew. Marcus’s mother called from a night shift and was put on speaker long enough to say, “Be sweet to each other and don’t be stupid.” Sarah said she would try on both counts. She went home that night and told Claire, “His family is normal.” Claire, who was learning the word’s limits, said, “I’d like to meet him before your father invents him.”
Sarah wanted that too. She also wanted a version of her father that did not exist on demand. Richard loved his daughter in the solid, unexamined way of a man who had built a life and assumed the life’s opinions were the same thing as its morals. He had shaken the hands of two boyfriends before. One was a tennis player who said sir too often. One was a boy from church whose father Richard knew from the club, which had done half the work of approval before the boy opened his mouth. Marcus was not going to get that head start. Sarah knew it. She brought him anyway, because hiding him would have made her father’s imagination the author of the evening.