By the third week, Patricia had established a meal schedule.
This is not a small thing in a home where two people have built five years of domestic rhythm. Daniel and I had a rhythm that worked for us: we cooked when we felt like cooking, we went to the diner on Friday nights because we liked the diner and we liked Friday nights without cooking, we had Sunday breakfast as a tradition — eggs and coffee and the newspaper and nothing requiring effort. The meal schedule Patricia established assumed that dinner would be ready at six-thirty and that everyone would eat together.
I work from home three days a week. On those days I have been known to eat lunch at my desk at one-fifteen and dinner at eight because that is when I finish. My hours are not nine to five. A six-thirty dinner that I’m expected to be present for requires me to stop working at a specific time regardless of where a project is.
I mentioned this to Daniel. He said, “She’s just trying to be helpful. She likes having us all together.”
I said that I understood she liked it, but that a six-thirty dinner every night was a schedule change that affected my work.
He said she’d be leaving soon.
This was week three.
She did not leave soon.
The work call was the incident I remember most specifically from that period, because it had a concrete consequence and a concrete moment where I understood something about what the arrangement had become.