I noticed it not with satisfaction — or not only with satisfaction — but with the slightly sad quality that comes when you realize how easy a thing was that took a long time to get to. Two sentences. Accurate and brief. Available for eighteen months.
In the second week, Marian sent me a text. She had apparently been thinking about the conversation we had had on the phone the day after his call to her, the one where she said I was not someone she needed to worry about on Daniel’s behalf, and she sent me an article about changes in how smaller regional companies were thinking about operations infrastructure. She said she didn’t know if it was relevant but it made her think of me.
I read the article. It was actually interesting. I sent her a two-paragraph response about how the trend it described tracked with things I had been seeing in my own work. She responded with a question. We went back and forth for four exchanges.
This should not have been remarkable. It was the ordinary texture of two adults who share a family and find each other professionally interesting. It was remarkable only because it had not happened before, because the version of our relationship in which I was the person who wasn’t working had not supported this kind of exchange.
Marian is, I am learning, a more interesting person than the dinners had shown me. She ran a school administration department for nineteen years. She has opinions about organizational management that are sometimes wrong and sometimes right and always arrived at through experience. She is precise and fair in a way that suggests those qualities were job requirements for two decades and became habitual.