I said: yes.
This is not a revelation that changes everything overnight. It is a piece of information about my own patterns that I am still working with. I still sometimes say okay when I don’t mean it. I catch it more often than I used to. Daniel still sometimes defers. He names it faster than he used to.
We are both working on the distance between what we have been doing and what we want to do. The distance is not infinite. We can see across it.
What Patricia Said Near the End
The Sunday lunch in January — the one I described where she rang the bell and brought the grocery store pie — contained something I have not mentioned yet.
Before she left, after Daniel had gone to get her coat from the hall closet, she said something to me.
She said: I want you to know I’m proud of him. What he built with you.
I looked at her for a moment. She was not looking at me directly. She was looking at a photo on the windowsill — Daniel and me from four years ago, a camping trip, both of us squinting into the sun.
I said: I’m proud of it too.
She said: I know I wasn’t — I know I didn’t make it easy this fall.
I said: no.
She said: I didn’t mean to, but I know that doesn’t really change it.
I said: it doesn’t. But I appreciate you saying so.
This is the closest we came to a direct accounting in that visit. She did not enumerate her specific trespasses. I did not enumerate my specific frustrations. We acknowledged that something had happened and that it had not been fine and that we were in a different place now.