He was looking at the sink. “You don’t like her.”
There it was. The reframe, in a different form: you are asking about logistics and I am responding by questioning your feelings about my mother.
“I like her fine,” I said. “I liked her before she moved in and rearranged my kitchen and knocked on my office door twice while I was on client calls and invited her brother to stay without asking me.”
He said: “She was just –“
“I know she was just being herself. That’s the problem, Daniel. She’s being herself in my house, and herself includes deciding what’s logical for the spice cabinet and who comes to visit and when dinner is. And I have been patient about this, and I need us to have an actual conversation about when it ends.”
He dried his hands. He was not angry — Daniel rarely gets angry in the obvious way. He was the careful-quiet of someone who wants to leave a conversation before it gets harder.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said.
“What will you say?”
“I’ll tell her it’s time to make a decision.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
I looked at him for a long moment. He met my eyes and then looked away.
“Okay,” I said.
I picked up the dish towel.
I should not have said okay. I should have asked what “soon” meant, specifically. I was doing again the thing I had always done: softening the end of a conversation because the alternative was pushing further and I did not want to push further and risk a different thing.