Chapter 8: Distances
Mom asked for a second meeting three months after the chapel.
We sat in the same coffee shop with different weather outside the glass. She did not ask me to withdraw anything or to soften Ethan’s role. She asked whether there was a version of the future in which holidays did not require a security plan. I said holidays were possible when the present stopped treating my husband’s work as an insult and my refusal to echo the word nobody as disloyalty. She nodded as if the sentence were a document she would review later. We parted without an embrace and without a rupture loud enough to become another story.
May you like
Caleb visited the apartment with takeout and a careful silence that eventually became conversation about his own plans—work that did not run through the dealerships, a move that would put distance on the map as well as in the family chart. I told him he did not have to choose a side like a team jersey. He said he had already chosen not to laugh in a back row while his sister walked alone. That was enough side for one afternoon.
Ethan’s caseload returned to the ordinary impossible: too many files, too little time, the same stubborn attention that had once pulled a thread in a charity ledger. I watched him sleep on the couch with a brief open on his chest and understood that the man my father had ranked by salary had always been expensive in a different currency—hours given to people the system preferred to forget.
