Page 24 of What Maple Heard

One evening, a man from the foster home came to pick up the kids. He spotted me across the room and said something to Maple, and Maple walked him over.

“This is David,” Maple said. “He’s one of the coordinators at Shineforth House.” She looked at me. “David, this is Cade, our volunteer.”

David shook my hand. “I actually wanted to meet you.” He had an easy manner about himself I instantly got drawn to. “Marcus talks about you. Like, a lot.”

I blinked. “He does?”

“Yeah.” David laughed. “Which is saying something because Marcus does not talk a lot. But lately he’s been talking. We had a careers session last week.” He paused. “He said he wants to be like you when he grows up.”

I didn’t say anything.

There was a lump in my throat that had arrived without warning and was not moving. I was thirty-nine years old and standing in a dance studio and I was not going to be undone by this information in front of a foster home coordinator and also in front of Maple.

I swallowed. Hard.

“That’s—“ I stopped. Tried again. “That’s really good to hear.”

I looked up. Maple was watching me. Her face was completely still. No warmth, no softening. She held my gaze for exactly one second and then looked away.

I swallowed the lump and looked back at David.

“He’s a great kid,” I said. “Really great.”

Apart from my personal breakthrough with Marcus, nothing else had moved. Maple still looked at me like she didn’t care if I even existed, which was fair, considering what I had done.

Two weeks, and I still felt like I was walking on a treadmill, walking as fast as I could and staying in exactly the same place. But I was not getting off the belt. I didn’t care how long it took. I wasn’t backing down.

Right now, Marcus and I were in the back room putting final touches on the oak tree. It was, genuinely, the most impressive prop I had ever seen come together. Marcus had opinions about the branch angles and the leaf density and the structural integrity of the pulley mechanism that were several years ahead of his age. I had learned to stop arguing with him about the engineering and just do what he said.

Nancy was at the table next to us, hot-gluing individual paper leaves onto a garland.

“Hand me the copper wire,” Marcus said.

I handed him the copper wire.

“No, the thin one.”

I handed him the thin one.

“That’s the medium one.”

“Marcus, these are the same width—“

“They are not the same width.”

I held them up next to each other. He was right. They were not the same width.

Nancy laughed.

The back room door opened and Maple came in. She had her rehearsal clipboard in her hand, and an expression on her face that meant something had gone wrong.

“Olivia’s sick,” she said. She said it to Nancy but she was looking at the clipboard. “Her foster family just called. She has strep. She won’t be able to perform.”

Olivia was supposed to be the oak tree fairy. She was supposed to stand in front of the tree we had spent three weeks building, be lifted by the pulley Marcus and I had engineered, and be the centerpiece of the entire second act. The Fall Festival was six weeks away.

Nancy put down the glue gun. “Oh no.”

Maple pressed her mouth together. I watched her think. I watched her go through the options and find none of them good and try not to show on her face how stressed she was, because she was always protecting other people from her stress, I had seen her do it around me a dozen times in the three months I had known her.