He arrived at twelve forty three.
I heard the front door and his footsteps and the particular sound of a man who has just come from something significant and is consciously leaving it at the door rather than carrying it through the apartment. I had learned to hear the difference between his various arrivals over months of paying the same quality of attention he had always paid to me.
I was in the kitchen when he appeared in the doorway.
He looked at the counter.
I had made lunch. Properly. Not the assembled version of lunch that involved things taken from the refrigerator and placed on plates, but actual cooked food, one of his mother's recipes, the rice one she had described as non negotiable in its method, and I had followed every instruction exactly including the ones that seemed un
