It is, genuinely, enough to be going on with.
The Lunch, in Detail
I want to go back to the lunch, because the summary I gave at the start is accurate but compressed, and the compression leaves out the specific texture that made the moment what it was.
We had been sitting at the kitchen table for about twelve minutes. Patricia had made the soup the previous morning and warmed it before Daniel came home, which meant it had been simmering on my stove since noon with Patricia in my kitchen, which was a thing I had stopped commenting on because the comments had not produced changes and I was tired of producing them.
Daniel came home at five-forty, earlier than usual because it was a Friday. He kissed me in the hallway and said something smelled good, and it did smell good, and the soup was the third or fourth time Patricia had made something that genuinely warranted the compliment. I want to keep saying this because it matters: the food was good. The help, at the level of pure task completion, was often real help.
We ate. Daniel was telling a story about something that had happened at the hospital — a piece of equipment that had needed emergency maintenance and the particular cascade of problems that produced. Patricia was listening with the focused attention she gives to her son’s stories, the attention that makes him feel seen. I was eating and half-listening and also, somewhere in the back of my mind, thinking about a project deliverable that was due Monday and whether I had everything I needed for it.