My father would arrive with a small project in mind. He had fixed the sticky drawer; he had tightened a cabinet hinge that I hadn’t noticed was loose; on a Sunday in early January he asked if I had a caulking gun because the caulk around my bathtub had started to pull away from the wall, and I said I didn’t and he arrived the following Sunday with one and spent thirty minutes in the bathroom making the situation right.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I like doing it.’
My mother would arrive with food — usually something she’d made that morning or the day before, portioned out into containers she didn’t expect back. Soup in winter, pasta salads as it got warmer, once a casserole of the kind I had not eaten since childhood. She would ask about my work, and I would tell her something real rather than the summary version, and she would listen in the way she has always listened when she understands that listening is what’s required.
I started to understand something during these visits that I hadn’t expected to understand: the situation, as bad as it had been in its acute phase, had produced a version of my relationship with my parents that was in some ways better than what had preceded it. Not because conflict improves things automatically — it doesn’t — but because having the conflict, and having the conflict resolve into something real rather than something swept under and left to fester, had moved us into a different register.