‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not.’
‘I’ve been thinking about how many times I’ve done that with you specifically,’ he said. ‘And I think it’s been more than I realized. Because you’re capable. And capable people — I think I assumed capable people could just handle whatever I told them. That was wrong.’
My father is not someone who says ‘that was wrong’ about himself in my experience. He is not incapable of it; he’s just not someone who does it unprompted. I sat with this for a moment.
‘Thank you for saying that,’ I said. ‘It means something to hear.’
‘I just wanted you to know I understood what you were saying,’ he said. ‘Not just the practical stuff. The other thing.’
‘The pattern,’ I said.
‘The pattern,’ he said.
We talked for a while after that — about the apartment, which he said he liked better than he’d expected; about the gym, which he’d been using consistently; about a county commissioner he’d worked with thirty years ago who had apparently moved into the same community and who they’d reconnected with. Small things. But the small things followed the hard thing, and that ordering felt right.
## What Adam Said When the Business Hit Its First Good Month
Adam called me on the second Saturday of December, which he seemed to be treating as a significant day. He opened with: ‘So December is going to be my first good month.’
‘Good as in?’ I said.
‘Good as in I covered all my overhead and paid myself actual money,’ he said. ‘Not enough to live on, but real money. And I have appointments booked into January.’