I thought about it.
“Yes,” I said. “Obviously. Meeting Andrew through Paige, on a normal occasion, without all of this — that would have been better.”
“But.”
“But if it had happened that way, I might not know you. Which sounds like a strange thing to say, but I don’t think I would have ended up in a situation where we spent three hours solving a delivery coordination problem and I found out you were a person I wanted to know.”
Ruth smiled. “The mess had a product.”
“The mess had a product,” I agreed.
“Is that a way of being grateful for it?”
“It’s a way of acknowledging what came out of it without being grateful for the mess itself. I’m not grateful my daughter lied to her husband’s family for eighteen months and made me dead. I am grateful for what happened when the lie came to light, because what happened was Ruth Lawson left a voicemail.”
She looked at me for a moment.
“You’re a good woman to be in a mess with,” she said.
I laughed. It was a real laugh, the kind that comes from recognition rather than performance.
“Back at you,” I said.
## How I Am Now
Winter. Hartfield gets real winter, which I have never learned to love but have learned to accommodate. The community meals program runs a special December push, which means I have been at the hospital early and at community centers late and I am tired in the productive way that comes from useful work.