“Yeah,” he said. “It felt right.”
“How’s the business?” I asked.
“Slow,” he said. “Which is normal for the first couple months, apparently. I have six regular clients already. The walk-in traffic is starting.”
“I’m glad,” I said. I meant it. I had never wanted Adam’s business to fail — not even in the moments when I’d been most frustrated with the situation. I wanted it to succeed, because success would mean he could repay the loan, which would mean my parents would have more resources than they currently had, which would mean the decisions of the next several years would be made from a position of more stability.
“I want to pay them back,” he said. “The whole thing. I know it’s a loan, but I want to treat it like one.”
“That’s what they’d want too,” I said. “I think they’d want that.”
## The Days They Stayed With Me
My parents spent four days with me before the moving truck arrived at the new apartment. I had said six weeks; it turned out to be four days, which was both better than expected and also, in retrospect, the right amount of time.
My mother made dinner on two of the four evenings, which I hadn’t expected and which was, I realized, her version of contributing. She cooks the way she did when Adam and I were children — the same recipes, the same timing, the same slightly overcrowded sense of the table. My father fixed a drawer in my kitchen that had been stuck for two years. He didn’t mention fixing it; he just fixed it and put the tools back and mentioned at dinner that the drawer should be fine now.