Forty minutes, the two of us and the girls, in a hotel dining room.
And she talked about what she was going to say to him and what she had brought for them, and she had a bag with two little things in it that she had wrapped.
And at one point she said she had not slept, she was that excited.
And I ate my breakfast.
And about four times in that forty minutes I nearly said it. I can still feel where those four moments were.
And every single time, what stopped me was not kindness.
It was that if I told her in a dining room at half seven, she would have had three
hours to decide how to be when she saw him — and she would have decided to be dignified, because that is what that woman is.
And I did not want dignified. I wanted the thing that happens to a face when it has not been given any warning.
