He told me a little about his childhood. He asked about mine. He asked about Carl, carefully, and I told him some of what I’d told Ruth. He told me that Paige talked about his father in a particular way, and what she had said had made him understand why losing Carl had mattered so much even if she hadn’t always shown it easily.
“She talked about my father to you?” I said.
“In the early months of our relationship. She told me her father was wonderful and that losing him was the hardest thing she’d ever been through.” He paused. “She didn’t talk about you.”
I absorbed that. Not with surprise but with the particular quality of receiving information you already knew was there.
“No,” I said. “I don’t imagine she did.”
“She does now,” he said. “In the last few weeks, she’s talked about you more than she has in two years of my knowing her. I don’t know if that’s useful to know.”
“It is,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
The coffee ran to almost two hours. We split the check without discussion, which I appreciated. He drove back to his parents’ house, and I drove home, and I thought about what it was like to have a son-in-law at fifty-nine years old, in October, after a Saturday dinner where I had been revealed to be alive.
Strange. Strange and also, underneath the strangeness, good.
## The Apology Paige Made to the Lawsons
The apology Paige made to me at dinner and in our Monday phone call was one thing. The apology she owed to Andrew and to his parents was different, and it was hers to make without me involved.