It lasted about forty minutes, which was standard. He’d been reading a book about the space program — one of the popular histories that come out every few years, about a specific mission or a specific era. He’d been interested in this subject lately in a way he hadn’t been when I was growing up, and he kept pressing me to read the same books, which I kept meaning to do and hadn’t.
He told me about something he’d read — a detail about the preparation protocols that he’d found unexpectedly moving. I don’t remember the exact detail now. I remember that I was half-listening, doing something in my kitchen, and that I told myself I’d ask him more about it later.
He asked about my job. I told him there was a staffing issue I was dealing with. He said something sympathetic and slightly generic, the way he was with professional things — he’d been an engineer for most of his working life and didn’t always have the vocabulary for administrative problems, but he tried.
We talked about the weather in my city versus the weather in his city. We talked about a restaurant near him that had recently closed, which he’d been upset about for weeks. We talked about nothing in particular for a while, in the way that Sunday calls accumulate into a life.
Before we hung up, he said: “Hannah.” The way he said my name sometimes, with a pause before it that meant he was going to say something he’d been working up to.