Grant sat down slowly at the kitchen table. The chili had started to catch on the bottom of the pot and he did not get up to deal with it.
He knew that phrase. Every parent of a certain age knows that phrase. Don’t make it weird is almost never a request for calm. It is a request for silence. It means: I have already decided, and I would prefer that you not make me feel anything about it.
“I built this house,” Grant said.
“Nobody’s saying you didn’t.”
“I’m saying it. Because you seem to have forgotten.”
“God.” Daniel’s voice went up. “It’s eight weeks. Eight weeks, Dad. Claire’s mother has a bad hip and they cannot live in a construction site and you have a three-bedroom house on a mountain that you rattle around in by yourself. What exactly is the hardship here?”
Grant said nothing.
He had learned, over the course of a long and mostly quiet life, that saying nothing is a remarkably effective instrument, and that it is almost never used, because most people cannot stand the sound of their own words hanging in the air unanswered.
Daniel could not stand it either.
“You know what,” his son said, “if you don’t like it, go back to the city.”
