We did not have any dramatic conversations during those four days. We had ordinary ones — about the apartment, about the neighborhood, about whether my father thought he’d use the gym (he thought he would; he would later be right about this). About the closing, which happened on the third day, and which my mother experienced more emotionally than I’d expected.
“It’s just a house,” she said that evening, and then immediately, quietly: “I know it wasn’t just a house.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
“We should have talked to you earlier,” she said. It was late. My father had gone to bed. She was sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of tea that had gone cold.
“Yes,” I said. “You should have.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think of it as — I didn’t think of it as leaving you out. I thought of it as assuming you were in.”
“I know,” I said. “But being assumed into something is different from being asked.”
She nodded. She looked at the cold tea.
“You’ve always been so capable,” she said. “You’ve always just handled things. I think I forgot to ask because you never seemed to need asking.”
It was the most honest thing she’d said to me in the course of all of this. I didn’t have a perfect response to it. I said: “I need asking sometimes.”
“I know that now,” she said.
## The Moving Day
The moving truck came on a Friday. It was a four-hour job — my parents had given away or sold a significant amount of furniture before the closing, keeping only what would fit in the new apartment, and what remained was manageable. Adam drove up and helped carry boxes. I helped carry boxes. My father directed traffic the way retired men who have spent their careers directing institutional operations tend to direct traffic.