Chapter 9 Shane #2
Zoe grabbed a slice of pepperoni and returned to her spot at the table, where she was carefully painting a tiny Styrofoam ball a rusty red. Mars, I assumed. She worked with the same focused intensity I’d seen in Maya when she graded papers. The same furrow between their brows.
I grabbed my own slice and settled into the chair across from them, watching them like this was exactly where I was supposed to be. Maya was attaching rings to Saturn with hot glue, her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration. Zoe was adding craters to Mars with the end of a paintbrush.
"Hand me the yellow?" Maya asked without looking up.
Zoe passed it over. Their movements were synchronized, practiced. The easy rhythm of two people who'd been doing this alone together for a long time.
"What can I do?" I asked, already pulling my chair closer.
Maya looked up, surprised. "You don't have to help. This is our mess."
"I want to." I pulled my chair closer to the table. "Put me to work."
Zoe slid a Styrofoam ball across the table. "Earth. Blue and green. Don't mess it up."
"No pressure."
"It's only the planet we live on." She handed me a brush. "Try not to make it look like a bruise."
I dipped the brush in blue paint and got to work.
It had been years since I'd done anything like this.
Maybe not since my own school projects, when my dad would sit at the kitchen table with me, patiently helping me glue popsicle sticks together or paint volcanoes that never quite erupted the way the box promised.
"You're going outside the lines," Zoe observed.
"Earth doesn't have lines."
"It has continents. You're putting South America in the wrong ocean."
"Maybe it's a climate change statement."
Maya snorted. Zoe fought a smile and lost.
We worked in comfortable silence for a while. Maya hot-glued Saturn's rings. Zoe added craters to Mars. I tried not to drown Australia.
"More green on the top," Zoe said, leaning over to inspect my work. "That's where Canada goes."
"You're very bossy."
"I'm very accurate." She grabbed a smaller brush and touched up my mistakes."Now it doesn't look like Earth has some kind of skin condition."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence."
"You're better at making dinner than painting planets." She said it casually, but there was something underneath. Something that sounded almost like affection.
Maya caught my eye across the table and smiled.
I smiled back.
This. This was what I wanted. Not the galas or the calendar shoots or the women who wanted the headline. This. A kitchen table covered in glitter. A teenager who insulted my painting skills. A woman who looked at me as if I belonged here.
We finished the solar system around eight o’clock.
It wasn't perfect. Jupiter was slightly lopsided, and the sun had a fingerprint in the yellow paint. But Zoe seemed satisfied, which was what mattered.
She carried the whole thing to her room to dry, walking slowly, arms outstretched like she was carrying something that might explode if she moved too fast.
Maya collapsed back in her chair, surveying the glitter carnage on the table.
"I'm going to be finding glitter for weeks," she said.
"Small price for scientific accuracy."
"Nothing about that project was scientifically accurate. Pluto isn't even a planet anymore, and we included it anyway because Zoe said it deserved representation, anyway."
"She's not wrong."
Maya laughed, tired but real. She looked beautiful like this. Hair escaping from her ponytail, blue paint on her cheek, glitter on her fingers.
I reached across the table and brushed the paint from her cheek with my thumb, slow and careful. She went still. Her eyes met mine, and for a moment neither of us moved.
"Shane..."
"You had paint," I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended.
"Oh." She swallowed. "Thanks."
I pulled my hand back and tried to remember how to breathe.
Zoe's door opened. We both straightened like teenagers caught doing something we shouldn’t have.
She wandered back to the table, grabbed another slice of pizza, and dropped into her chair.
"There's a daddy-daughter dance next week," she said, not looking at either of us.
Her voice was too casual. Too careless. I recognized the tone. It was the voice of someone pretending something didn’t matter because it mattered too much to admit.
Maya's face tightened. "We can figure something out, honey. I could take you—"
"It's fine." Zoe shrugged, picking at her pizza crust. "I don't even want to go. It's stupid anyway."
The words hung in the air. Heavy with everything she wasn't saying.
"Zoe—" Maya started.
"I'm tired." Zoe stood, leaving her half-eaten pizza on the table. "I'm going to bed. Thanks for dinner, Shane."
Her door closed behind her. Not a slam. Just a quiet click that somehow felt worse.
Maya stared at the closed door, her shoulders sagging.
"It's like this every year," she said quietly. "She pretends she doesn't care. And every year I watch her heart break a little more."
I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.
But something clicked into place. A decision I didn't even know I'd been circling.
I knew exactly what I was going to do.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I lay in my apartment, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Zoe's face when she said she didn't want to go. The careful blankness. The hurt tucked underneath.
I thought about Maya trying to be enough for both roles. Mother and father. Protector and provider. Everything, all the time, with no one to help carry the weight.
And then I thought about my own father.
Thirty years on the job. Commendations. Awards. Recognition. The kind of firefighter other firefighters told stories about.
But that's not what I remembered most.
I remembered him showing up. Every Little League game, even the ones where I struck out four times.
Every school play, even the one where I forgot my lines and stood frozen on stage for thirty seconds.
He'd work a twenty-four-hour shift, come home smelling like smoke, and still make it to my science fair with coffee in hand and pride in his eyes anyway.
He taught me that being a man wasn't about the heroic rescues or the headlines. It was about the ordinary moments. The ones that said: I see you. You matter. I’m here.
His voice was still in my head, clear as ever.
Show up, son. That's all that matters. Just show up.