Madame Moreau told him, in December, that she was going to begin formally training Cece in the Vodou tradition the following year.
He was in the Moreau house kitchen, the Christmas visit, the specific warmth of the house at its December best. Madame Moreau sat across from him with her coffee and said it directly, which was how she said everything: 'She is ready. She has been ready for a year. I've been waiting to be certain of it.' A pause. 'Baron Samedi has been certain of it for longer.'
'I know,' he said. He had known Cece was approaching this point for a long time — had watched the development with the careful attention he brought to people he loved, the specific attention that tried not to project or manage but simply to see.
'You're not surprised,' Madame Moreau said.
'No,' he said. 'She has always been preparing for this. She just didn't name it until she was ready to name it.'
Madame Moreau looked at him with the specific assessment she had been applying to him since he was five years old: not unfriendly, simply thorough, the read of someone who did not miss things and had decided long ago that he was worth not missing. 'You are good for her,' she said. 'Not because of what you know. Because of how you listen.'
He thought about this. He thought about what it meant to be good for someone — not useful to them, not impressive to them, but genuinely good in the sense of contributing to their flourishing rather than to your own sense of being valued.
'She's good for me too,' he said. 'In exactly the same way.'
'Yes,' Madame Moreau said. 'That is the correct form of it.'
Cece came in from the back of the house and sat down at the table with the ease of someone in their own kitchen. She had heard the end of the conversation — not the specific words, but the quality of it, and she looked at her mother and then at Kael with an expression that said she understood what had been said.
'Next year,' she said to her mother.
'Next year,' her mother confirmed.
Cece looked at him. 'I've been waiting to be ready,' she said. 'I think I'm ready.'
'I know you are,' he said. He said it in the register he had learned from her: information, not reassurance. The factual register of someone who had been watching and meant what they said.
She accepted it the same way she always accepted his honest assessments: without performing gratitude, with quiet recognition that the statement was given in good faith and received in kind.
They ate dinner at the Moreau table. The gumbo was excellent. Baron Samedi's presence at the evening was warm and the candle in the corner of the room burned with a quality that was not entirely the candle's doing. The New Orleans winter was cold by New Orleans standards and warm by every other standard, and the kitchen was full and specific and real.
He thought: this is what I was working toward. Not just the camp and the cabins and the wish and the battle. This too. The kitchen in December and the people in it and the work that is still ahead for both of us and the fact that we will do it while being in relationship rather than in isolation.
He thought: the preparation was for the life. This is the life. It is good.