“That’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” he said. “What happened — what Paige told us — that’s not okay, and I don’t want you to think that I think it’s okay.”
I appreciated that. I also did not want to use his call as an opportunity to consolidate him against his wife.
“I hear you,” I said. “I’m not looking for you to take sides.”
“I’m not either,” he said. “But I want you to know that I’m angry. Not at you. At the situation. At…” He stopped.
“At Paige.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “At Paige.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Did you know? About what she’d told us?”
“I did not know until your mother and I met at the community meals planning meeting.”
He exhaled. “She really didn’t tell you.”
“She did not tell me. I knew your name and that she was married and very little else. I thought the courthouse wedding was a choice you’d made together for simplicity.”
Another silence.
“Saturday,” he said. “Are you still coming?”
“I’m coming.”
“Thank you,” he said. And he sounded like he meant it in a way that had nothing to do with politeness.
After I hung up I sat in my kitchen and thought about what it must be like to be Andrew Lawson at that moment: a man eighteen months into a marriage, working from the belief that his wife had no living parents, now confronted with the fact that one of her parents had been meeting with his mother at a planning committee and would be coming to dinner on Saturday. The floor of his marriage had shifted. He was still standing on it, but he was standing differently.