## The Call
Nathan called on the third evening of the trip. Not the series of calls I had anticipated — just one, on Thursday, around eight o’clock.
I answered.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
A pause. The sound of the ocean in the background. “How are you?”
“Good,” I said. “How’s it going there?”
He was quiet for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said. “The place is nice. Mom’s enjoying it.”
“Good.”
“Olivia.” He stopped.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. About the pattern.” Another pause. “I don’t think I understood, before this week, how much you’ve been dealing with. Not just about the trip. In general.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We went to dinner last night,” he continued, “and I spent the whole meal managing — checking that she was comfortable, worrying about whether the service was slow enough that she’d be anxious about it, redirecting when she started talking about Gerald in the way that usually goes somewhere painful. And I realized, at some point in the middle of all of this, that that’s what you’ve been doing. But you’ve been doing it while also not being the person whose job it is to do it.”
“That’s accurate,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I’ve said that. I mean it differently now than I did when I said it Saturday morning.”
“I believe you.”
“I don’t know how to fix it,” he said. “I don’t know what fix even looks like. But I think — I think I need to stop asking you to absorb the costs of my choices.”