Thank you for telling me when you did it

He said something last night I have been carrying around all day. We were doing the dishes and he said: thank you for telling me when you did it, and not after. I said what do you mean, and he said — carefully, like somebody putting something down on a table rather than handing it over — that I usually tell him things once they are finished. The handle on the back door. The thing with Dale in September. Going back to pottery after the gap. He hears about them when they are resolved, as news, and he has assumed for years that this is just how I am. And he is right. I do do that. I had not known that he had noticed, and I had certainly not known he had a list. I asked him whether it bothered him and he said no, and then after a second, said: it means I find out what has been hard once it is over. Which is the same sentence I have been making about him all year, pointed the other way. I did not have anything useful to say to that. I said I know, which was true and inadequate, and he let it be inadequate.

From myself. All year. About him. I have been keeping a private ledger about a man who has been quietly keeping the same one about me, and mine felt justified and his would have felt unfair, and I cannot find the difference now that I am looking for it.