Sunday he cooked.
Not elaborately pasta, something from a jar he'd improved with things from the market, bread from yesterday's stall. The kind of meal made by someone who knew how to feed people without making it a production.
I sat at his kitchen counter and watched him and we talked about nothing important. His sister had sent him three increasingly panicked voice notes about her defence in March. A planning regulation in D.C. was making the Georgetown after-project complicated in ways that were almost philosophically absurd. I told him about a clause in the Q4 report that had turned out to mean the opposite of what it appeared to mean, and he laughed the real one, the undignified one and I felt the specific warmth of being the person who produced that sound.
The kitchen smelled like
