I went to work. I had a nine o’clock meeting about a platform migration that I was leading, and I ran that meeting, and I was present for it, because I am a professional and the platform migration was not going to wait for my family situation to resolve itself.
## Diane Calls Again
My mother called again three days after the first call. This was not surprising. Diane Bennett processes things in rounds, and the first call is usually the initial position, and the subsequent calls are the worked-through version.
She started by asking how I was doing. This was new. She does not usually start calls with how I’m doing when there is family weather in progress; she usually starts with the weather.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It’s been a strange week.”
“It has.” She paused. “I talked to Claire for a long time yesterday.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she knows she handled things badly. She didn’t say she was wrong, exactly. But she knows it wasn’t handled well.”
I noticed the distinction. Didn’t handle it well was different from was wrong. The first was about execution; the second would be about the underlying decision. Claire had apparently not gotten to the underlying decision yet.
“That’s something,” I said.
“She’s scared, Elise. She’s not just being cruel. She has this idea in her head about how the day is supposed to look and feel, and she got scared that it wouldn’t go the way she imagined, and she made a decision that she shouldn’t have made.”