The apartment looked, at the end of moving day, like a place people lived. My mother had insisted on unpacking the kitchen first, which meant the coffee maker was running and the spice rack was in order before anything else, and that small domestication made the whole place feel inhabited rather than transitional.
We ate pizza from boxes on the new furniture because nobody wanted to cook and nobody wanted to leave. My father found a basketball game on the television. Adam fell asleep on the couch for about twenty minutes in the way he has slept since he was a teenager, abruptly and completely.
“It’s a good place,” my father said to me, over the pizza.
“It is,” I said.
“I think your mother might actually like it,” he said. He said it quietly, in the way parents say things about each other that they’re not sure they’d say if the other parent were listening.
“I think she might too,” I said.
My mother came back from the bedroom, where she’d been hanging pictures.
“The light in the bedroom is nice in the morning,” she said. “I didn’t notice that before.”
Nobody mentioned that I’d said this about my office once, and that the light had been part of why I’d chosen it. Some parallels are better left as parallels.
## Three Months Later
Three months after moving day, a few things have become clear.
My parents have settled into the apartment in a way that surprised me a little — surprised me because I’d expected it to take longer and because I’d expected my mother to be more resistant than she turned out to be. She joined a book club at the community center. My father goes to the gym twice a week and has met two other retired county employees who play cards on Thursdays. They have dinner with me about once a week, which is more consistent than before the sale, and which feels, paradoxically, like an improvement on what we had before.