Page 143 of ClickBack

“A little.”

We take our food into the living room. Jarrett has been here often enough now that he knows which lamp I like on and where I keep the coasters. He leaves the remote beside me rather than choosing something, then steals one of the dumplings I was saving.

“You ordered your own.”

“Yours looked better.”

“They’re from the same container.”

He eats it while I’m explaining. I take one of his and discover he has left me the largest.

The show I choose is one we’ve already started. We miss most of the first scene because Rae sends a voice note about the neighborhood, then another correcting the school name. Her excitement is impossible to misunderstand. I answer the second one with a question about the interview instead of the house.

Jarrett pauses the television.

“She’s getting ready to go whether they offer her this job or not,” I say. “I can hear it.”

“Would you rather she wasn’t excited?”

“No.” I turn the phone over before I find another useful question. “I would rather I was.”

He finishes chewing, puts his carton on the coffee table, and waits for me to say the rest. I have come to appreciate that he can do that without arranging his face into concern.

“Rae used to know I’d had a bad day before I put my bag down. She would come in and tell me she’d already finished her homework, already started something for dinner. I thought I’d raised a thoughtful child.”

“You did.”

“I did. I also raised a child who knew how to make herself easy when I had too much going on.”

The television is stopped on a woman reaching into a cabinet. I keep looking at her rather than him.

“Rae could tell when Byron and I had been arguing even if we were perfectly pleasant by the time she got home. She’d take Zion upstairs, or ask me to come help her with something. She got very good at finding a reason for us to be in separate rooms.”

Jarrett shifts his plate onto the table. “You talked to her about that?”

“Some of it. Not enough.”

I think of all the times I praised her for being mature. She was a mother herself by then. There was always another reason to assume she could handle what I hadn’t meant for her to notice.

“When she and Jeremy were together, I hated how often she rearranged things for him. His shift changed, so hers had to change. His car needed work, so she worked out how everybody would get where they were going. If there was a gap, I kept Zion. I never minded having him. I minded how often she was the one expected to solve it.”

“And you told her.”

“Repeatedly. She reminded me that I didn’t see everything he did for his son.”

“Did you?”

“No. And when they worked out how to parent from separate homes, I was still angry about things she had decided to leave behind.” I lift my carton again and put it back. “He helped her think through Charlotte. The visits. The travel with Zion. She says they have a plan.”

“You don’t trust it?”

“I haven’t seen enough of it to trust it. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t done the work.”

My phone lights up with a picture of Rae herself this time, standing in front of a mirror in her interview clothes. She has her hair tucked behind one ear and one hand on her hip. I recognize the expression. She wants to know whether she has chosen well, and she has already decided she has.

Wear the other earrings, I send. Then, before I can leave it at that, You look ready. I’m proud of you.

Her answer is a string of hearts.