Part Nine: What Was Said
His mother stayed for dinner.
This was not planned. It became the plan gradually, in the way that certain evenings accumulated their own shape without being designed. His mother said she would make something, she had already looked in the refrigerator and there was enough. Nora said she shouldn’t trouble herself. His mother said it was no trouble. Adrian stayed out of this negotiation because he had learned, at some point in his childhood, that certain things between women were resolved more cleanly without his involvement.
Dinner was soup — Margaret’s soup, which she had been making in the same way for forty years and which occupied a specific place in Adrian’s memory that was almost architectural, the smell of it being somehow the smell of a particular kind of safety.
The babies slept, one after the other, in the portable arrangements that Nora had constructed with the practised efficiency of six weeks of doing this alone.
They ate.
They talked about things that were not the main thing — the city, the park, the logistics conference that Nora mentioned she was planning to attend virtually in the spring, which led to a twenty-minute conversation between her and Adrian about supply chain reform in humanitarian contexts that was, he noticed, precisely the kind of conversation they had always been good at having, the kind that went somewhere unexpected and left both of them with a thought they hadn’t had before.
His mother watched this conversation with the expression she used when she was not going to say what she was thinking.
After dinner, she kissed Nora on the cheek and held both babies one more time, gravely and gently, and told them that she would see them soon. She said this to the babies, not to Nora or Adrian, which meant it was not quite a statement about anyone’s decisions and was also clearly a statement about her own.
At the door, she took Adrian’s arm.
“Well,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“She didn’t tell you,” she said. “Think about why.”
“I know why,” he said.
“And?”
He looked at his mother. She was sixty-eight years old and she had raised him through things and she had never told him what to do, only shown him, by example and occasionally by pointed question, what doing it right looked like.
“And I need to think about what I want,” he said. “And then I need to be honest about it. And then we need to talk.”
She patted his arm.
“Good,” she said. “In that order, too.”
She left.
