We ended up talking for forty-five minutes.
I found Ruth Lawson, in those forty-five minutes, to be exactly the kind of person I would want to know independently of the situation. She had strong opinions about things that mattered, held them without being dogmatic, and was genuinely curious about people. She told me about her years as a school principal with the specificity of someone who had loved difficult work and done it well. She asked about my community meals program in a way that was interested rather than polite, which was the right question because the program was where I put a lot of myself.
We talked about Carl. She asked about him with the directness of a person who understood that dead husbands were not topics to be avoided but people to be acknowledged. I told her about the last two years of his illness and the way the community had gathered around us. She told me about a health scare David had had three years ago that had changed how they spent their time. We were two women in their late fifties and early sixties comparing notes on loss and survival and what you build on the other side of hard things.
“I want to say something directly,” she said at one point. “About Paige.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m not going to pretend I understand what she was thinking. I’m also not going to pretend this didn’t matter. Andrew is still very upset, and I think he’s going to need to decide for himself, over time, whether this is something he can move through.”