I said: yes, same place.
She said okay and used it and put it back.
Two hours. She said she needed to get going, that she had a book club meeting at three and she didn’t like to rush. I walked her out and she hugged me at the door in the straightforward way of someone who is not managing an impression of warmth but is simply warm, in this moment, in this doorway.
She said: your home is lovely, Maya.
She said your home.
I said: thank you, Patricia. Come back when you can.
She said she would.
I went back inside and stood in the kitchen for a moment and then I made coffee, and Daniel came in and I said: that was good.
He said: yeah. It was.
We did not say anything further about it because we did not need to. It was a good visit. It was exactly as long as it needed to be. She had asked beforehand, brought something, eaten lunch, done the dishes with instructions, and left when she said she would.
These are not remarkable things. They are the ordinary things a guest does. They had not been ordinary for four months and now they were, and the ordinary was what we needed them to be.
A Note on What This Story Is Not
I have been telling pieces of this to people for a few months now, and a pattern in the response interests me enough to name it.
The response, reliably, is a version of: you were right to make her leave. And I think: I know. But that framing — right and leave — skips the part that was actually hard, which was not the departure but the period before it.