He asked me a direct question

He asked me, at the sink, drying a pan, not looking up: what would it take. I said what do you mean. And he said, for you to say yes to it. Not soon. Yes. I did not have an answer ready. That frightened me considerably more than the question did, because I have been carrying this for the better part of a year — the counting, the arithmetic at red lights, the appointment I have not booked — and I have apparently been carrying a complaint rather than a request. A complaint does not need an answer. A request does. I said something about the roof and the quarter. He waited, which he does not usually do, and then said that is not what I asked, which is my line, and he said it without any edge at all. And I said I do not know, and he said okay, and dried the pan, and that was the end of it. Not a row. Not even tense. He asked the best question anybody has asked me this year, in the kitchen, with a tea towel, and I had nothing, and he let me have nothing, and now it is eleven o'clock and I am sitting here with the laptop trying to work out what I would have said if I had been honest and quick enough. I think it is: tell me the whole of something before I find it out. Once. On purpose, when you do not have to. Which is not about a baby at all.

A complaint is safe. You can hold a complaint for years and never be refused. If I ask for the thing and he says yes, then I have to find out whether it was ever actually about that. And if he says no, I have to know that.