Claire was brushing her hair. “You don’t know where it leads. You haven’t met him.”
Richard sat on the edge of the bed and took one shoe off and held it. “I know the pattern. Nineteen. Gig job. A girl with her whole life in front of her. I’ve seen the pattern.”
“You’ve seen a pattern,” Claire said. “You have not seen this boy.”
He slept on that and woke up still believing himself prudent rather than unkind. Prudence is a flattering coat. It fits a broad man in a navy sweater especially well. Over the next weeks he did not forbid the name Marcus. Forbidding would have made him the kind of father Sarah left the room to escape, and he did not want to be escaped. He asked questions shaped like questions and weighted like verdicts. Does he have a car of his own. Does he live with his mother. What did his father do. Is he in school now or is college a speech. Sarah answered what she could. She refused what she could not. The refusals made Richard more certain, because certainty loves a gap. Into the gap he put a delivery job that would still be a delivery job in five years, an apartment with too many people in it, a young man whose ambition was a sentence said to impress a girl.
He did not say the other thought in words he would have wanted written down. He did not have to. When he pictured the boy walking up his front path, the picture arrived already skeptical, and the skepticism had a color in it he would have denied if Claire had named it. She almost named it twice. Both times she chose a nearer battle, because she still believed the evening itself might do what her sentences could not.
There was a history under the skepticism, as there usually is. Richard’s own father had measured suitors by their shoes and their handshakes and once told a story, laughing, about a Black family that had looked at a house on their old street and “known better” than to make an offer. Richard had not laughed. He had also not argued. He was seventeen then, and argument at that table had a price. He grew up. He worked beside men of every background and liked several of them. He told himself the old story had stayed in the old house. A person can believe that until his daughter’s hand is in someone else’s hand on his own hardwood. Belief that has not been tested is only a story you tell about yourself at dinner parties.
On the Sunday before the dinner Claire said, “If you humiliate her, she will remember the humiliation longer than she will remember the lesson you think you’re teaching.”
“I’m not planning to humiliate anyone.”
“Good. Plan a little harder. Plans slip when pride walks in.”
He kissed her forehead. The kiss was sincere. Sincerity is not the same thing as safety.
Claire had liked the sound of Marcus before she liked the idea of the dinner. That distinction mattered to her. She was not a woman who fell in love with her daughter’s romances. She had watched the tennis player and the church boy pass through the house like weather. Marcus, in Sarah’s telling, kept showing up in small proofs. He had driven Sarah home from a movie and walked her to the door and waited until the porch light answered. He had sent Claire a short text through Sarah’s phone the week Claire had a migraine: Sorry she’s late, she was helping me find a form. She’s on her way. No emoji. No performance. Claire read it twice and thought, Someone raised him. Then she thought, Richard will need more than that, and she hated that the second thought arrived so quickly.