About three weeks after he got back from the coast, we were at the kitchen table like that. He had made chamomile tea, which he does when he can’t sleep; I was reading something I can’t remember now. The house was quiet. The neighborhood was quiet. It was the kind of late-evening moment that could have been any of a thousand late-evening moments in ten years of marriage.
He said, without particular preamble: “Do you remember when we drove to the coast the first time? That weekend, before my dad died.”
“I remember it very well,” I said.
“I was thinking about it on the trip. About how different that weekend felt from how I’ve been living since then.” He turned his mug. “I don’t mean you specifically. I mean the quality of attention I had. Like I was actually there. Present to the thing I was doing.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
“I think I’ve been managing everything for so long that I forgot that’s not the only option.” He looked up. “You reminded me. Not on purpose, I don’t mean strategically. But by — doing what you did.”
I thought about that. “I wasn’t trying to remind you of anything. I was just tired of pretending the trip was what it wasn’t.”
“I know.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m glad you were.”
The house made its small sounds — the refrigerator’s hum, the distant noise of a car going by. I looked at him across the kitchen table, the man I had married at twenty-four with more confidence than information, and felt, briefly and unexpectedly, something I had not felt in a while. Not resolution. Not certainty. Something quieter: the sense of being in the right room.