He is still sometimes too quick to problem-solve when I need to be heard. I am still sometimes too slow to say when I’m hurt, which means he doesn’t know to witness it. These are known problems, documented, under ongoing management.
My mother and I have had three dinners since the wedding. We are finding our way back to the ordinary register, the one that doesn’t carry everything we said. It is slower than I would like and probably faster than she expected. We talk about her garden, which is large and absorbing and gives us a topic that is genuinely interesting to both of us. She knows plants the way I know construction: from the inside, in terms of what they need and how they work, not just what they look like.
Elise and I have texted more in the past few months than in the previous year. Not a flood — we are not suddenly close in a way we weren’t before — but more. Noah is, from what I can tell, a good person who genuinely loves my sister, which is what matters. They are settling into married life in the way that all newly married people settle: with some awkwardness and some delight and a lot of figuring out what the shared thing actually is.
The first payment came from Elise three months after the wedding: two hundred and forty dollars, her half of the restoration quote. She sent it with a note that said: ‘First of two. Mom will send hers.’ My mother’s came two weeks later, no note, just the payment with ‘for Rosa’s work’ in the memo line.