I arrived at the kitchen that Saturday morning to find Carol already there with her youngest, Emmett, who is three and a force of nature. I had not been told Carol was coming. I had a deliverable for a project that I had planned to work on Saturday morning while Daniel was doing maintenance in the backyard.
I worked in my office with the door closed and could hear Emmett’s particular variety of toddler narration for two hours through the wall. The deliverable got done. It was not the morning I had planned.
I brought the calendar thing up to Daniel that evening. He said he hadn’t realized she’d been adding things. He said he’d talk to her about it. He may have talked to her about it. The calendar additions stopped. I did not know whether they stopped because he said something or because the pattern of visiting had changed.
This is the particular difficulty of living with someone whose choices Daniel was managing without transparency: I did not always know whether the improvement was a correction or a coincidence.
What Lena Said About the Text
After Lena’s question at dinner — the one about what I had actually agreed to — I went back to the text exchange from September.
I had it on my phone, as text conversations tend to persist. It was a Thursday afternoon text from Daniel: Mom needs to find a place, her deal on the rental fell through, could she stay with us for a few weeks while she sorts it out?