“In a minute.”

It became the refrain of the whole evening, in a minute, while the food on his own place went untouched and the food on ours disappeared.

He reached across the table at one point and turned my blue plate so the chipped edge faced away from me.

“Better,” he said, as if the chip had been bothering him, as if a chip on a plate were a thing a man rearranges at his own dinner table while his family eats and he does not.

I did not understand, that night, why the chip mattered to him.