Donna knows Paige since childhood. She attended Paige’s elementary school holiday performances. She gave Paige a check when she went to college. She calls Paige by her full name when she is being serious with her and Paisley when she is being affectionate, which is a dynamic Paige has never quite known how to respond to and which Donna considers one of her favorite things about their relationship.
After the dinner at the Lawsons, Donna was the person who helped me process. She listened to the whole account, asked her two questions, and then spent the following weeks helping me distinguish between the things I needed to act on and the things I needed to simply hold. This is a specific skill. Some people help you make decisions; Donna helped me figure out which things were decisions and which were just facts I needed to sit with.
She came to Thanksgiving, as I mentioned. She stayed for twenty minutes and then she left because she had her own family dinner, and in those twenty minutes she managed to make Andrew feel like someone she had known for longer than that, which is a quality I have watched her deploy over twenty-two years and which never stops being impressive.
“I like him,” she told me afterward.
“I do too,” I said.
“He looks at your daughter the way Marv looks at me,” she said. “Like she is occasionally baffling and consistently worth it.”
I thought about that for a while.
## The Part Where I Am Not Saintly