At a certain point in the conversation — about an hour and forty minutes in, when we had moved past the immediate events and into the underlying territory — I asked him a question that I had been thinking about since December.
“When we did the projections,” I said, “the Sunday with the spreadsheet. When I was showing you the client list and the income projections. What were you thinking then?”
He thought back. “I was thinking it looked solid.”
“Were you worried?”
“A little. Not because I thought you’d fail. Because I didn’t know what it was going to feel like.”
“What what was going to feel like?”
He was quiet. “Not being — I was always going to be the one who’d worked at a company. A real company. You know? A building, a salary, benefits. And you were going to be independent, which is great, but it’s different. It doesn’t have that shape.”
“The shape of a job.”
“The shape of a job. Yes.”
I thought about that. “And the shape of a job is what you tell your family about.”
“It’s what they understand,” he said. “When my dad asks how things are going at work, he means: is my company still there, is my role still there, am I still the person I was last time we talked. That’s what work means to him. You can answer that question in a sentence. What you do is — harder to explain.”
“It’s not that hard to explain.”
“I know. I’m not saying it is. I’m saying I didn’t try.”