## The Test
About three weeks after the trip, Elaine called on a Sunday morning. Nathan and I were making breakfast — a genuinely ordinary Sunday, coffee and eggs, the newspaper in pieces on the table.
He answered. I could hear Elaine’s voice, the tone of it, which I had learned to read over years the way you learn to read weather. She sounded sad. She had spent the previous day alone and the aloneness had gotten heavy.
Nathan listened. I watched his face do the thing it does — the pull between what he felt for her and the new awareness he was trying to hold.
“Mom,” he said, “I’m sorry you had a hard day. Do you want to talk for a bit?”
He didn’t look at me to check whether we had plans. He didn’t start calculating whether we could drive over. He just sat down at the kitchen table with his coffee and talked to his mother, and I made the eggs, and the Sunday continued.
After he hung up he said: “She’s going to try the grief group on Tuesday.”
“Good,” I said.
“She sounded better by the end of the call.” He was quiet for a moment. “I think — I think I’ve been trying to fix her loneliness rather than just be present with it.”
“Probably,” I said.
“That’s exhausting,” he said, almost to himself. “No wonder it was spilling over everywhere.”
I put a plate in front of him. He looked up at me.
“Thank you,” he said.