She turns her head on the pillow and she looks at me.
"You keep sayingall right."
"It is the only word I have this morning. I learned it from you.”
"All right."
I laugh.
It is the first laugh I have laughed this morning and it is small and tired and a little surprised, and her face does a thing I have not seen it do, which is a soft small thing at the corner of her mouth. She is letting me see her tired. She has not let me see her tired before.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Stay in bed with me. No need to get up.”
"I have things."
"What things?”
"I should make calls. I should think."
"It is six-twenty in the morning."
"Yes."
"Stay in bed with me."
She looks at me a count.
"All right."
---
I make us coffee at eight.
I bring it back to the bed. I sit cross-legged on top of the quilt in her henley and the wool socks of hers I finally put on, and she sits up against the headboard in her undershirt with her hair messy and the quilt across her hips, and we drink coffee in the bed at eight in the morning like two women in a cabin who are not waiting on the road for a sound.
"Tell me about you," I say.
"What about me?” She seems suspicious as she always does when I ask any questions about her.
“Tell me about when you were a child."
"Evangeline." She sighs and I think she won’t respond.
"You do not have to. We do not have to talk. I am offering conversation. I would like to get to know you more.”
"All right."
She drinks the coffee and takes a minute.
The cup is in both her hands. She is looking at the cup.
"Reno," she says.
"My mother was a cocktail waitress. My father was the man who came in for shifts on Tuesdays. I lived with my mother in a one-bedroom apartment on Wells Avenue from the time I was born until I was sixteen. She worked nights. I made my own dinner from when I was nine. I was good at it. The thing I was best at by twelve was rice. I could put a dinner on the table for the two of us by the time she came home at one."
