“He sounds like someone David would have liked,” Ruth said.
“David sounds like someone Carl would have liked,” I said.
That was the whole exchange. It was enough.
## The Small Things That Have Changed
There is a group chat now. It is called, at Andrew’s suggestion, Family Check-in, which is not a creative name but is an accurate one. It has five people in it: me, Paige, Andrew, Ruth, and David. David texts approximately once a week, usually a weather update or a note about something he read that he thought was interesting. Ruth texts more often. Andrew sends photographs of things he finds funny, which is a quality I have come to appreciate about him. Paige reads everything and responds selectively, which is her personality in microcosm.
I sent a photograph in December of the community meals program’s holiday delivery, which was our largest single-day effort, two hundred and sixty-three households, and Ruth texted back a string of numbers representing exactly how many volunteers would have been needed at each station to achieve that output in a single day. She had done the math in her head. I showed it to Donna, who found this extremely funny and said that Ruth and I were going to take over the world.
Paige called me on a Wednesday in November for no particular reason. Not a scheduled call, not a call tied to a holiday or an event. She called, and I answered, and she said she just wanted to talk, and we talked for twenty-five minutes about nothing important. Her work. A neighbor’s dog that she found irritating. A book she was reading. She asked about the program. She asked whether I had seen Donna recently.