He was quiet. “I’m sorry I made you fit a category.”
“I know,” I said. “Do the work, and we’ll be okay.”
## The Lunch with Beth
Beth and I had our lunch in July, at a place she picked near her office, a sandwich-heavy lunch spot that was crowded enough that we were sitting fairly close together and the conversation felt naturally contained.
I had been thinking about what I wanted this lunch to be. I did not want it to be a rehash of the situation; we had covered the relevant facts by text and phone. I wanted it to be the beginning of a different kind of relationship, if that was available.
Beth is thirty-three and has two kids, ages six and four, and works in HR at a distribution company. She is smart and a little bit running at the edge of capacity — the particular energy of a working parent of young children who is keeping multiple significant things going at once and has been doing this long enough that it looks effortless from the outside and feels like controlled chaos from the inside. I know this energy because I have watched it in friends. I recognized it in Beth immediately when we sat down.
We talked about the kids first, which was easy. Then we talked about her job. She asked about my work and I explained it, properly this time, in enough detail that she could ask follow-up questions, which she did. She asked about the business model — how do you find clients, how do you price, what does a typical engagement look like — and the questions were genuine rather than polite. She has an operational mind. I should not have been surprised; she works in HR, which is operationally demanding in ways people outside it often don’t register.