Caregiver schedules thrive on routine, and ours found a gentle cadence. I brought fresh bread or oranges; he had the lamp on and a chair ready. We made coffee, buttered toast, and traded stories—his about overnight trains and river spans and city lights viewed from draughting tables; mine about kids gone busy, a marriage caught in a long winter, and a house that echoed.
He never treated me like I was simply help. He treated me like I was a person with a mind that deserved conversation. When I read aloud to him—essays about time and presence, chapters from a slim novel—his eyes followed my mouth, not the page. “You have a warm voice,” he said once. “It softens the hard edges of sentences.”
One afternoon, while I sliced carrots, he watched my hands move. “Steady,” he observed. “Hands for work—and for comfort.” It wasn’t flirtation. It was exact, appreciative, careful. Still, something in me warmed that I’d been trying to keep cool.
We read by lamplight in the evenings. He closed his eyes sometimes, not from sleep but from listening. “If my wife could hear you,” he said, “she’d rest easier. You’ve returned something to this house.”
I carried that sentence like a folded letter in my pocket.
Care, Attention, and the Line Between
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