That was the whole exchange, and it was enough. My parents were now without a house, which was a thing they had chosen and could not be undone. The apartment was ready. The movers were booked for Saturday. The season had changed and they were in it now.
I thought about the climbing rose on the fence. I thought about the kitchen cabinets with the soft-close hinges. I thought about my father fixing my kitchen drawer without mentioning it. I thought about the thirty years that had accumulated in that house — the Christmases and the ordinary Tuesdays and the dinners that I now remembered without being able to locate a specific date for any of them.
I thought about what my mother had said: ‘You’ve always been so capable. You’ve always just handled things.’
I thought about what she’d meant by that and what she hadn’t understood about what it cost.
And then I went back to my documentation review, because that was what the afternoon required.
## What Leah Said Over Coffee, Revised
About a week after the move, Leah and I met for coffee on a Saturday morning, and the conversation was different from the ones we’d had in the thick of it. Less strategy, more assessment.
‘How do you feel about how it went?’ she asked.
I thought about it. ‘Better than I expected,’ I said. ‘Not as good as I’d have liked.’
‘What would better have looked like?’
‘My parents asking me before deciding,’ I said. ‘Not just about where they’d live, but about the whole thing. The loan. The plan. What they thought would happen after. They had a lot of conversations I wasn’t part of, and then they had one conversation with me where they told me what the conclusion was.’