Doing nothing.
Grant looked around the kitchen. The counters he had planed by hand. The window over the sink that he had positioned specifically so that he could look at the ridgeline while he washed dishes, because he had spent forty years looking at a parking lot through a break-room window and he had promised himself, somewhere around 1996, that if he ever got out he would put a window where he wanted one.
Doing nothing.
“Daniel,” he said, “why didn’t you ask me first?”
There was a pause on the line. And in that pause, Grant heard something he had been half-aware of for years and had never let himself look at directly.
It was irritation.
Not embarrassment. Not the small, sheepish sound a man makes when he realizes he has overstepped. Irritation, plain and immediate, the sound of a man who has been inconvenienced by an unexpected obstacle.
“Dad. Don’t do this.”
“Do what? I’m asking you a question.”
“You’re making it weird.”
