QUESTIONS OVER DINNER
"Mama?"
I looked up from my plate.
Liam had too much pasta wound around his fork — an ambition that exceeded the fork's structural capacity — and he was looking at me with the expression he wore when something had been working itself out in his head and had finally arrived at the asking stage. The serious expression. The one that meant the question had been considered before it was delivered.
"Hmm?" I said.
"Did your boss say thank you today?" he said.
I felt something loosen in my chest. The uncomplicated warmth of a five-year-old's version of the world, in which bosses said thank you when you helped them, and that was the primary measure of whether a day had gone well.
"He did," I said.
"Because you helped him?"
"Yes."
He nodded with the satisfied certain
