Jonah and Lily’s weekends with us meant an extra two mouths at the table, extra shoes by the door, extra everything, and Marcus never once suggested those weekends should shrink to make room for anything easier.
He showed up to every game. That included the whole season I never left the bench.
Coach Whitfield actually pulled him aside once, midway through that season, half apologizing for how little playing time I was getting.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Marcus told him, loud enough that I heard it from the water cooler. “I’m not here for playing time. I’m here because he’s here.”
I never forgot that, even years later, the specific weight of a grown man choosing bleachers over better things to do with his Saturday, over and over, for a kid who barely touched the court.
I asked him once, years later, why he’d bothered showing up to games I clearly wasn’t playing in.
“Because someday you might,” he said, simple as that. “And I wasn’t about to miss it deciding you weren’t worth the gas money until then.”
He sat across the kitchen table from me most nights, working through algebra he clearly hadn’t touched since high school himself.
He’d squint at the problem for a solid minute before admitting he had no idea either, then pull out his phone and look it up right alongside me, no pretense that he already knew everything. “We’re figuring this out together,” he’d say. “That’s still figuring it out.” I never once heard him complain about the hours it cost him, even after a full shift at the warehouse where he worked nights sometimes.
