“Yeah,” she said. “That sounds about right.”
On the third day I had a long, unfocused morning, the kind where you don’t do much of anything and somehow that is the point. I took a long shower. I reorganized a closet I’d been meaning to reorganize for two years. I ordered dinner from a Vietnamese place I liked and Nathan didn’t, and I ate it at the kitchen table reading a novel, and there was something almost laughably simple about being able to order the food you want without negotiating.
I didn’t think I was betraying anything by enjoying that simplicity. I think I was learning something I needed to learn about how much of my ordinary life involved small adjustments to other people’s preferences — Nathan’s, Elaine’s, the combined household of their needs that I had been so thoroughly absorbed into that I had stopped noticing how rarely I asked what I wanted.
On the fourth day I drove to a town about ninety minutes away that had a good independent bookstore and a coffee shop I’d read about, and I spent the morning exactly as I wanted to spend it. I bought three books. I drank an excellent cappuccino. I walked around the town’s small downtown without any itinerary.
I was not having a secret luxury adventure. I was having an ordinary week in my ordinary life, doing ordinary things, and discovering that without the constant low-frequency noise of managing other people’s needs, those ordinary things were genuinely pleasant.