Page 50 of Crosswind

I look at him — his hands in his lap, the peonies balanced carefully, his eyes on the landscape with the concentrated attention he brings to things he is pretending not to be thinking about.

"You don't have to be nervous," I say.

"I'm not nervous," he says, still looking at the landscape.

I squeeze his hand. "Jan."

"I'm preparing. There's a difference."

"What are you preparing for."

He glances at me. "Meeting your parents. I'd like to make a good impression."

"You will."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that," I say. "I know my parents and I know you and I know what happens when those two things come into contact."

He looks at me. The assessment, Jan deciding whether to accept the reassurance or continue to manage the situation independently.

"My father is quieter," I say. "He takes longer. Don't read anything into it if he's not, he’s not a fast person. He thinks before he talks. He'll like you before he shows you he likes you."

"And your mother."

"My mother will like you immediately." I pause. "She might also ask you several direct questions. She's curious. It's not an interrogation."

"I can handle questions," Jan says.

"I know you can." I take his hand. "That's why I'm not worried."

He looks at our hands. Then out of the window again. His shoulders are slightly higher than usual, which is the Jan version of nervous, and I hold his hand and let him prepare and watch the landscape go by and feel something I have been feeling since last night — a particular settled quality, like a calculation that has finally resolved.

— — —

My mother opens the door before we reach it.

This is a thing she does — she hears the gate and she's at the door before you've knocked and she greets you as someone for whom hospitality is not a performance but a genuine expression of how pleased she is that you are there. She is small and warm and has my colouring and the particular quality of someone who has been reading rooms since before I was born.

She looks at Jan.

"You must be Jan," she says, in Dutch.

"I am," he says. Also in Dutch, which I should have anticipated and somehow didn't. Perfect Dutch… not accented, not hesitant. Jan who moved here at twenty-two with one suitcase and a list.

Something in my mother's face opens.

She takes both his hands. "Come in," she says. "It's good to meet you. Patrick has told us very little, which means it's serious."

I look at the ceiling.

Jan says: "He mentioned you make excellent stamppot."

My mother laughs, the real one, the full version, and pulls him inside, and I follow them both through the door into the house that smells like it always has, like my childhood and my parents' particular combination of coffee and beeswax and something cooking.

My father is in the sitting room.

He stands when we come in. He is tall, taller than me, which I always forget until I'm standing next to him, and he has the same quality of stillness he has always had, the stillness of someone who has learned that most things are better observed than reacted to. He looks at Jan.