Dinner

He does not see his parents often enough.

He knows this. He has known it for some time. The knowing has not made it easier to change, which is the specific problem with knowing — it is not the same as doing, does not automatically translate into the behavior it identifies as necessary. He knows he should call more. He calls when he calls. He knows he should visit. He visits when he visits.

He is not estranged from his parents. He wants to be clear about this. The relationship is real and ongoing and complicated in the specific way of families who have been through hard things and found their way, imperfectly, to a version of each other that can sit at the same table and have a meal.

He goes on a Sunday evening in late September.

His mother made rice and chicken and the salad she makes with the dressing from scratch that he has never been able to exactly replicate,

though he has tried. His father is already at the table when he arrives — early, which is new, which is the kind of small thing you notice about a parent when you have been paying attention and then a thing changes and you have to update your model of them, which is both disorienting and quietly good.

He sits down.

He puts his phone in his jacket pocket.

* * *

His mother asks about the writing. He tells her: it is going well, considering. The considering is the summer, which he does not detail. She knows something about the summer — not the worst of it, but the general weather of it. She is his mother. She reads things he does not send her. She pays attention in ways he has not always known how to receive.

She says: are you eating enough?

He says: I eat.

She says: that’s not what I asked.

He laughs. It comes out easier than he expected. He says: I’m eating better than August.

She nods. She passes him the chicken.

His father asks about the website. Vincent tells him about the first-month numbers — the 29,800 requests, the spike on June 29th. His father nods in the way that means he is proud of a thing he does not fully understand, which Vincent has learned over the years to read correctly, which used to read to him as indifference and now reads as the particular pride of a man who expresses things through presence rather than language.

His father has always been there. Quietly, without announcement, in the background. At the high school readings when Vincent had them. At the library event when he sold his first thirty copies in one night. At the Spectrum News screening that Vincent had not thought his parents would come to, had not told them was happening in the way of someone who still sometimes protects the important things by not announcing them, had found them in the back row when he looked up from the television.

His father was in the back row.

He did not say anything about it afterward.

Neither did Vincent.

* * *

He looks at his mother across the table. He thinks about all the mornings she got up anyway. The years when he was difficult in ways he could not explain and she stayed. The versions of him she loved before he knew how to be a version worth loving. The specific patience of a person who has watched someone they love struggle with something unnamed for years and stayed in the room.

He looks at his father. He thinks about the back row at the Spectrum News screening. He thinks about the nod his father gives when he talks about the numbers — the nod that is the most his father knows how to do and which he is learning, finally, to receive as the thing it is rather than the thing it is not.

He does not say any of this.

He stays at the table longer than usual. He does not check his phone. He lets the conversation move at the pace of a Sunday evening with people who have known him his whole life, which is slower than his internal pace and requires a specific act of will to accommodate.

He lets the evening be slow.

When he leaves — two hours later, which is longer than his usual visit by an hour — his

mother stands at the door and says: come more often.

He says: I will.

He means it this time.

He drives home with the windows down. The September air is cool now, genuinely cool for the first time since May. He drives past the block in Holyoke where he grew up without planning to, without deciding to, finds himself there and then past it before he has time to prepare. The house looks the same. It always looks the same.

He drives back to Springfield.

He goes upstairs.

He feeds the cats.

He sits at the desk.

He writes about the dinner for forty minutes — not for publication, just for the record. The salad. His mother asking if he is eating. His father in the back row at the Spectrum News screening, which is still in him, has been in him for two years, comes up when he thinks about his father the way certain memories do when they have found the right compartment.

He writes: He is still learning. That part never stops.

He means it as the truest thing he knows.

* * *

He texts his mother on a Tuesday morning in October: can we do dinner this week?

She responds within three minutes: yes. Sunday. I’ll make the chicken.

He thinks about this exchange for a moment — the speed of her response, the specific offer, the fact that she named the chicken without being asked because she knows it is the thing he likes, the accumulation of small attentions that constitute being known by someone who has known you your whole life.

He writes in the notebook: being known is different from being understood. She knows him in the way of someone who has watched him become himself, layer by layer, year by year. Understanding might come later, might not come completely. The knowing is already there. He is grateful for the knowing.

He puts the notebook down.

He picks up the phone.

He calls instead of texting.

She picks up on the second ring.

They talk for forty minutes.

Not about anything important. About the garden, which is winding down for the year. About a documentary she watched. About a

cousin who is getting married. About the weather, which is doing what October does in Western Massachusetts, which is being beautiful in the specific way of something that knows it is ending.

He listens. He asks questions. He is present.

When they hang up he sits with the phone in his hand for a moment.

He goes to the desk.

He stays with it.

This is also the practice. This is also how you stay in the world — not only through the writing but through the calls and the dinners and the forty minutes talking about a garden that is winding down for the year.

He reaches for the pen.

* * *

He thinks about the notebook as a physical object more than he thinks most writers think about their notebooks.

He has thought about the paper — weight, texture, the way different papers receive different pens, the way a very smooth paper makes his handwriting faster and less considered and a slightly rough paper makes it slower and more deliberate. He uses a paper

weight that is slightly heavier than standard, which means the pages do not bleed through, which means he can write on both sides if he chooses, which he does not, but could.

He has thought about the binding — the sewn binding that allows the notebook to lie flat when open, which is essential, because a notebook that does not lie flat requires one hand to hold it and one to write and the one-handed writing is less fluid. He has tried spiral notebooks, which lie flat but have the wire that catches his wrist. He has tried ring binders, which are for other purposes. He has tried sketchbooks. He has returned, always, to the black composition notebook with the sewn binding.

He has thought about the pen — the specific nib size, the specific ink weight, the way the pen moves across the paper. The Pilot G2 0.7 is the answer he has arrived at after years of trying other answers. He has tried fountain pens, which require maintenance he does not have the patience for. He has tried ballpoints, which are inconsistent in their ink delivery. The G2 0.7 is exactly right. He buys them in packs of twelve.

These are not incidental choices. They are part of the practice, as specific and considered

as the prose style or the revision process. The notebook is where the work begins. The notebook is the most important object in his life. He takes it seriously.

He turns to a new page.

He uncaps the pen.

The page receives it.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The cost is time. Writing time given over to distribution, to logistics, to the machinery of getting the work out. He resents this imperfectly. He does it anyway. Because the work has to reach people or it is only half itself.

His hand finds the pen.

He moves forward.

He takes in what is there.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He reads it back. Is it right? Is it true?

He does not know yet. The light is different. The day has moved on. His body is tired. Ghost is asleep. Vincent looks at the notebook. The work outlasts the pain. He picks up the pen. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

The pen is back in his hand.

He puts down the next line.

He has never not written the next line.