There is a voice coming from the television that Mom seems to find significant.

I don’t know his name. I don’t need to. What I know is this: when he appears on the screen, the room changes temperature by perhaps half a degree — not the measurable kind, just the kind a dog notices. Mom leans forward. Something in her goes still in the way that means she is paying close attention, which is a different kind of still than resting.

I am on the sofa. The morning is already warm — 23°C before ten o’clock, which puts the afternoon somewhere I’d rather not speculate about. The sun patch from the glass door to the deck hasn’t reached me yet but I’ve done the geometry. It will. I’m not moving.

Gus is elsewhere. He has his circuit.

The television crowd makes a sound — a collective inhale across thousands of people, somewhere on the other side of the world where the time is a completely unreasonable number — and Mom makes a small sound of her own. Not words. Just a sound. The kind that means something almost happened.

I have learned, across my years of living with these people, that the television is not a threat and not a meal and not a walk. What it is, exactly, I’ve never fully resolved. But I’ve learned to read the sounds it makes in relation to the sounds Mom makes, and from that I can extract the general shape of a thing.

Right now the shape is: she wants this particular man to do something well. That’s enough.

Dad is in the studio. I can hear the chair. The cookie jar is in there, and the jar on the counter in the kitchen, and I have noted both this morning already — once before breakfast, once after, which I feel represents a reasonable sampling of the available data. The situation is unchanged. The situation is always unchanged. This is, in its own way, a comfort.

There are ponderosas outside. The heat is pulling something up from them this morning — not the full rain smell, just a dry warmth, almost like the tree is exhaling. It comes through the doggy door in small portions. I receive each one with the same attention I’d give a more obvious gift.

The crowd sound again. Mom again. Her voice this time has a little lift in it — not quite a word, more like the beginning of one that resolves into a breath.

I don’t know what Ronaldo looks like. I don’t know what Portugal looks like. I know what Mom’s voice sounds like when something she hoped for almost happens, and I know the particular quality of this particular morning — the warmth, the ponderosas, the cookie situation, the deck light beginning its slow arrival across the floor.

I know Gus will come back through eventually, and that there will be a moment when both of us are in the same room again, and that no one will remark on it.

Some things are only good because they’re ordinary. I’ve spent some time on this. I keep arriving at the same place.

The crowd is very loud now. Mom says something that is not quite a word.

I close my eyes. The sun is almost here.

~P.W.