We were supposed to find a good spot in Forsyth Park before it got too hot. That was the plan. Marcus had a shortcut.
I want to be very clear that I asked, before we left the car, whether he had ever actually walked this route before. He said, and I am quoting directly: "I have a good sense of these things." He was wearing a bucket hat he'd just bought from a Walgreens on Abercorn. He had been in Savannah for forty-eight hours.
The shortcut took us down a street that ended at a wrought iron fence. Not a small decorative fence. A full institutional fence, the kind with the pointy tops, the kind that communicates this is the end of your journey. Marcus stood in front of it with his phone held sideways, which he believes provides additional GPS information. It does not provide additional GPS information.
"Okay," he said, "so we go around."
Around meant back the way we came, plus four extra blocks, in eighty-seven degrees of direct Savannah sun. The light was bouncing off everything — the stucco, the brick, the hood of every parked car. I was wearing a linen shirt and I was sweating through it in real time. My iced coffee from earlier was now just a cup of beige water. I held it anyway, for emotional support.
Marcus, to his credit, never stopped being enthusiastic. He pointed out a pretty building. He said "oh, this is actually a nicer way" about the detour he had caused. He saw a dog and said "buddy!" and the dog ignored him but Marcus didn't seem to notice or care. His bucket hat was doing absolutely nothing in terms of shade coverage. He had applied sunscreen only to his nose, in a stripe, because he'd seen someone do that in a movie once.
We finally got to the park. It was beautiful, genuinely — the Spanish moss doing its Spanish moss thing, families spread out under trees, someone playing guitar badly and joyfully near the fountain. We found a bench in the shade, and Marcus sat down with the relief of a man who had crossed a desert of his own construction.
He looked at me. He looked pleased with himself in a way that defied all available evidence.
"See?" he said. "Worth it."
And here is the thing about Marcus, the thing that makes him impossible to stay annoyed at: he really meant it. He wasn't being defensive. He wasn't trying to spin anything. He genuinely, in his whole heart, believed that the melted iced coffee and the wrong turns and the fence situation had produced a better outcome than if we had just walked the normal way. There was no irony in him. There is never any irony in him.
I gave him the last of my watery coffee because he'd forgotten to get his own and his bucket hat was sitting crooked on his head and the sun was in his eyes and he was squinting at the guitarist like he was watching something profound.
"You know there's a direct path from the parking lot," I said.
"Yeah," he said, "but we wouldn't have seen that building."
I thought about the building. It was, honestly, a very nice building. Old Savannah brick, window boxes, one of those black doors with the brass knocker. I had, in fact, taken a picture of it.
"Okay," I said.
He grinned. He has a very good grin. It is doing a lot of work in this relationship, that grin, and it knows it.
We sat in the shade until the heat peaked and started coming down, and Marcus told me about the Savannah Bananas, which he had learned about that morning from a pamphlet in the hotel lobby, and he explained them to me with the confidence of someone who had grown up going to Grayson Stadium, and I let him, because the shade was nice and the park was pretty and sometimes that's enough.
He's already planning our walk back.
I'm already planning to walk slightly ahead of him.