He said soon again

It came up in the car on the way back from the Thomases'. It always comes up in the car, because neither of us has to look at the other one and there is a natural end to it when we arrive somewhere. I said I turn thirty four in August. He said I know. I said so what are we actually doing, and he said soon. He is not being evasive. That is the thing I keep having to hold onto. He means it when he says it, and when he says soon he is picturing something quite specific — the Caldwell job finishing, a quarter that lands the way it should, some version of the world where there is a margin underneath us. He is not stalling. He is waiting for conditions, and he is the kind of person who can actually produce conditions, which is part of why I trusted him in the first place. The problem is that I have started counting. I know how many times he has said soon since the spring, and I do not like that I know, because keeping a tally is what you do when you have stopped treating somebody's answer as an answer and started treating it as data. We got home and he let the dog out and I stood in the kitchen with my coat still on for a while.