“Here,” I said, and I held one of the plates for him.
“Thanks,” he said. “My daughter wants chocolate. I want lemon. I’m trying to keep the peace.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
He pointed. Under one of the long folding tables, half hidden by a paper tablecloth, a little girl
with brown pigtails was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was holding a stuffed rabbit with one ear missing. She was watching every single person in that room like a little hawk.
“She doesn’t like crowds,” Mark said.
“She likes to know where everybody is,” I said.
He looked at me funny. “How’d you know that?”
“I was a kid like that too.”
He told me later that was the moment he decided to ask me out.
Hannah’s mother had left two years before that. Crystal was twenty-two when she had Hannah. Twenty-six when she walked out. She met a man who sold boats in Lake Havasu, Arizona, and one morning she packed two suitcases, kissed Hannah on the forehead while she was eating her
