I drove.
Twenty minutes home.
I did not answer him once, not because I was punishing him with silence but because I did not yet have the right words and I had learned from fourteen years of parenting Leo specifically that arriving at a conversation before I had the right words produced conversations that were about my feelings rather than about the thing I was trying to teach, which was a different conversation and one I could not afford to have by mistake.
He went for the stairs the moment we were through the door.
“Sit down at the kitchen table,” I said.
He turned.
He looked at me.
He sat.
I went to my bedroom and I went to the back of the closet, where there were boxes of things I kept because I had not yet decided what to do with them, the boxes that accumulate in every life and that you move from one closet to another without opening because opening them requires more than you have in the ordinary moments of an ordinary week.
