I went alone.
I had told Charles the night before that I was taking Thursday morning for a personal errand. He had looked at me with that careful, reading attention he brought to everything that mattered, and then he had nodded once and said, "Take the car," and had not asked where I was going or when I would be back. That restraint, that deliberate and precise giving of space without making the giving of it into a gesture that required acknowledgment, was something I was still learning to receive without automatically looking for the mechanism behind it. He was not performing patience. He was simply being patient. Those were different things and I was only recently beginning to understand which one I was dealing with.
