The note was still on our table beneath the juice glass. Derek must have put it back after photographing it.
Karen lifted the glass and folded the paper.
Derek watched her.
“I knew you meant it,” he said. “I just thought I could get you to change your mind.”
She sat down.
“Why?”
He pulled out a chair.
“Because it would solve everything.”
“For whom?”
He looked at the table.
“For us.”
Karen waited.
I set three mugs beside the kettle.
Derek rubbed his palms along his jeans.
“Melissa was excited about having Greg and everyone over. I wanted it to go well. Every time you brought up the work, I thought you were asking me to make you feel better about it.”
“I was asking you to reduce it.”
“I know that now.”
“You knew it then, too.”
He nodded.
“Yes.”
That answer helped more than an elaborate apology would have.
He looked at me.
“You told me. I still kept calling.”
“I should have spoken up earlier,” I said. “Long before Thanksgiving.”
Karen turned toward me.
I kept going.
“I saw what was happening at the birthday dinner. I left you washing dishes while I went to look at shelves. Then I complained about everybody else on the drive home.”
Derek looked surprised.
Karen didn’t.
“You’re both very good at noticing afterward,” she said.
I brought the tea to the table.
Nobody argued with her.
Derek apologized for assuming her time was available, for ignoring the first refusal, and for treating the trip as a threat she would eventually withdraw.
He stumbled over parts of it.
Karen let him finish.
Then she said, “I like helping you. I don’t want to become afraid of offering because you’ll decide I’ve offered everything.”
“I don’t want that either.”
“Then when I say what I can do, believe me.”
“I will.”
“And if I say no, don’t ask your father to change my mind.”
He gave a brief, embarrassed nod.
We sat for a while after that.
Karen asked about Rufus. Derek asked whether Pat liked having company or was relieved we had gone home.
“Both,” I said.
That made him smile.
When he left, he hugged Karen in the hallway.
She held him, then stepped back and straightened the collar of his coat.
The habit was so familiar it made my throat ache.
She loved him exactly as much as she had before.
She had simply stopped agreeing to everything he wanted.
Melissa called the next evening.
I answered the house phone.
“I’d like to speak to Karen.”
I handed it over without asking what she intended to say.
Karen took the call in the living room. I stayed in the kitchen.
When she returned, she began putting clean cups into the cabinet.
“How did it go?”
“She said we hurt her feelings.”
“What did you say?”
“That being spoken to as if I was staff hurt mine.”
“And?”
“She said that wasn’t how she meant it.”
Karen closed the cabinet.
“I told her I was willing to believe that. I still needed it to stop.”
There was no reconciliation that evening.
Melissa thought we should have helped despite saying we wouldn’t. Karen thought saying she wouldn’t should have ended the discussion.
They finished the call without resolving that difference.
Two days later, Melissa called again.
This time she asked about Florida first.