## Luke at the Kitchen Table
About three months in, Luke came to visit me. This was not a planned visit in the sense of a trip — he was passing through my city for a work thing and we had agreed, weeks earlier, that he would stay with me the night before his meeting. I had not been sure, when the appointment was made, whether the situation with our mother would make the visit strange, and in the weeks leading up to it I had thought about canceling and then decided not to.
He arrived in the late afternoon. We had dinner at my kitchen table, and it was at first the kind of visit that doesn’t address the thing both people know is in the room — talking about his work, talking about the city, talking about nothing that mattered. Then, after dinner, he said: ‘Can I ask you something?’
I said yes.
He said: ‘What would you have needed from me, back at the beginning? If I had handled it differently. What would that have looked like?’
I had to think about that. I had not anticipated that question and I did not have an answer ready. I thought about the first call, the one where he asked me to wait. I thought about what ‘different’ could have meant.
I said: ‘I think what I needed was for you to believe me. Not to immediately ask whether I was sure, not to say give her a chance to explain before you told me what you’d already verified. Just — to hear me say this is what I found, and to say okay, that sounds serious, and then let me decide what to do with it.’