How did you fix the cabinet?
How did you know what to put in the pot?
Could you fix a bicycle?
Could you fix a spaceship?
Adrian answered the first two seriously and the last one with a smile.
“Never worked on a spaceship.”
“But if you had instructions?”
“Oliver,” I said.
“What?”
Adrian looked down at his bowl.
“I’d probably give it a try.”
Oliver seemed satisfied.
After dinner, he went to finish his homework at the other end of the room.
I stayed at the table with Adrian.
“You know your way around repairs,” I said.
He rubbed one thumb along the edge of the table.
“I know some things.”
“More than some things.”
His expression tightened again, but not defensively this time.
It looked more like embarrassment.
“I used to be useful,” he said.
The sentence bothered me immediately.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because of the tense.
Used to be.
I glanced toward Oliver.
He had his head bent over a worksheet and was pretending not to listen.
“You were useful today,” I said.
Adrian did not answer.
I realized then that he had probably heard plenty of promises, advice and judgments from people who got to go home afterward.
I did not know enough about him to offer any grand speech.
So I did not.
Instead I pointed toward the cabinet.
“That thing has annoyed me every morning for months.
Tonight it works.
That’s not philosophy.
That’s a fact.”
He looked at the cabinet too.
His mouth moved like he was trying not to smile.
“Fair enough.”
Later, while Oliver got ready for bed, I stood at the sink washing three bowls.
Adrian picked up the towel beside me.
“You cooked,” I said.
“You don’t have to dry.”
“You worked all day.”
“So did you, apparently.”
For a few minutes we stood there doing something so ordinary that it almost hurt.
Wash.
Rinse.
Dry.
Put away.
The kind of routine nobody values until they have lost the place where routines happen.
When Oliver came out in his pajamas, inhaler in hand, he looked at Adrian and then at me.
“Is he sleeping outside tonight?”
There it was.
The question I had been avoiding.
