The stakes for Paige in her marriage were, in one sense, much higher than the stakes between her and me. I was her mother; the relationship had permanence that did not depend on her earning it. Andrew was her husband, and husbands can leave, and the reasons for them to stay have to be built rather than simply assumed. She was building. I could see that she was building, and I think Andrew could too, and that was why he was still there.
## The Friend Who Was There Before Any of This
I have mentioned Donna several times and I want to properly introduce her.
Donna Kalavic is fifty-seven years old and lives four blocks from me in Hartfield, which is a proximity we have maintained through two house sales and one relocation attempt on her part that did not work out, and which I consider an organizing feature of my adult life. She is a paralegal at a family law firm, which means she has a detailed and unsentimental understanding of how families fall apart and also, occasionally, how they don’t.
We met twenty-two years ago at a neighborhood association meeting that we both attended and both found largely pointless, and we discovered this mutual opinion in the parking lot afterward and went for coffee instead of going home, and the coffee lasted until eleven at night, and that was that.
Donna was widowed herself, earlier than I was — her husband Marv had a heart attack when she was forty-three and survived it, which she calls her second life. They have been more deliberate about their time since then, in the way that near-losses teach you to be deliberate. Marv and Carl got along in the way that spouses of close friends are required to get along and sometimes get lucky and genuinely like each other; they were in the latter category, which I was grateful for.