Charles was in the library when I returned.
Not working. The absence of work was the first thing I registered, the specific and unusual fact of him standing in a room without a document in his hands or a device open in front of him or any of the instruments of occupation that usually surrounded him in every space he inhabited. He was at the bookshelf along the far wall, not reading, simply standing in front of the spines and looking at them the way a person looks at something familiar when they needed to be in a room and the particular room was secondary to the need for the room itself.
He heard me come in.
"How was it," he said. He did not turn. He asked it facing the shelf, which told me he was asking genuinely rather than strategically, because a strategic question always came with eye contact.
"Hard," I said. "And good. Both of those things operating at the same time without canceling each other out."
He turned then.
