Three minutes, maybe four. The dog was fine. The brother had got a promotion. He said the right things back, hung up, and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.
He didn’t know why he was crying.
He told me about it the next week. A man in his late thirties, who is sometimes partnered, describing a call that on paper contained nothing. No cruelty or abandonment. A pleasant exchange.
Underneath the pleasantness, something that had been sitting in his sternum for thirty years, finally surfacing because for once he was tired enough not to push it down.