I lay in bed and listened to the three of them talking in my kitchen.
And I thought very clearly and very calmly, there it is.
I was not angry yet.
What I felt was closer to sorrow.
The specific sorrow of a hope being confirmed as unfounded.
I had given him the clearest possible account of what I needed.
He had understood it.
Agreed to it.
And then the first time an opportunity arose to practice it, he had reverted entirely to the prior pattern without apparently thinking about it at all.
Which meant either that the conversation had genuinely not registered or that it had registered and he had decided that registering was sufficient without requiring any actual change in behavior.
Both possibilities were bleak.
One was thoughtless.
The other was something worse.
I got up.
I went to the kitchen.
I said good morning to Andre, who was a perfectly nice person and bore no responsibility for his cousin’s choices.
I made myself coffee.
I excused myself to go for a run.
I ran for forty-five minutes in the park three blocks east.
The park I had known before Marcus.
And I thought about what my life looked like from the outside and what it felt like from the inside.
And how wide the gap between those two views had become.
When I got home, Andre was gone and Marcus was washing dishes.
He turned around and looked at me with the expression that had replaced the bet-on-your-decency expression.
Something slightly more apprehensive.
The look of a man who is beginning to understand that the account he has been drawing on may be close to empty.
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