Sad.

The tone of a woman describing an unfortunate weather system. Well, your father’s away again.

He works very hard for us. Said to a five-year-old, then a six-year-old, then a seven-year-old, in a voice with about four ounces of grief in it, perhaps two hundred times.

I heard her do it maybe a dozen times.

I never once said anything, because each individual instance was nothing, and because objecting to it would have made me the man who policed his mother-in-law’s tone.

That is how it is done.