Tessa handed me the message while I was looking for a receipt in the kitchen drawer. It was May, warm enough that she had come home carrying her sweater instead of wearing it. On a torn piece of notebook paper she had written that Nadine couldn't make the agreed visit and would call about another time. Below that, in smaller letters, was a question about whether Sunday afternoon might work.
"When did she tell you?" I asked.
"When we talked."
"Today?"
"Yes."
"Did she say why Sunday instead? Is she certain about the afternoon, or does she mean she'll let us know?"
Tessa put her sweater over a chair. "That's what she said."
"But did she sound as though—"
"Dad. Call her."
I was still holding the scrap of paper. "I'm just trying to know what she meant."
"Then ask her what she meant. I wrote it down because she asked me to tell you. I don't want to answer questions about it."
I started to say she didn't have to get upset. Her face changed before I finished, and I heard how convenient that sentence was for me. I could question her until she resisted, then make the resistance the problem. I laid the message beside the telephone.
"You're right," I said. "I can ask her."
"And don't tell her I made a fuss."
"I won't."
She didn't go upstairs immediately. She stood there looking at the paper as though I might hand it back. "I want to talk to her about my things," she said. "Not about whether you can move dinner and whether she's going to disappoint you."
I had thought the calls were helping. Tessa got ordinary time with her mother, and a changed arrangement came through without another adult conversation squeezed into the day. What I hadn't counted was the work left afterward: remembering words, measuring my reaction, wondering whether the message had made her disloyal to one of us.
When Nadine called that evening, I asked her about Sunday myself. We settled the time before I raised the other matter. I didn't want Tessa's objection to become another obstacle Nadine had to clear before seeing the girls.
"We need to stop sending arrangements through Tessa," I said.
"It was only a message. I was already talking to her."
"I know. Then I asked her questions she couldn't answer. She ended up between us."
"I wasn't asking her to negotiate."
"Neither was I, until I did." I moved the notebook closer. "We already agreed ordinary changes come through you. Let's make that mean you and me, directly. If one of us isn't available, the arrangement stays unconfirmed until we've spoken."
Nadine was quiet for a moment. "Sometimes that may mean a delay."
"Then we have a delay. We don't solve it by making her responsible."
She asked what to do if Tessa answered the telephone. I said she could ask for me, or tell Tessa she would call again. A request to get her father was different from a changed visit entrusted to her memory. We worked through the small distinctions because small distinctions were where our supposedly simple arrangements kept failing.
"This doesn't mean I stop calling her," Nadine said.
"No. It means you can call her without giving her a job."
Afterward I found Tessa at the table with a training leaflet among her schoolbooks. I told her what we'd agreed, including that her calls with her mother were still hers. She asked whether Nadine was angry. I said Nadine hadn't said she was, and I wasn't going to guess for her.
"You can tell her yourself if you want," I added. "But you don't owe either of us a defense of this."
Tessa nodded and returned to the leaflet. I wanted her to thank me, which was another useful thing to recognize and keep to myself. I took the torn message away and put Sunday's agreed time on the calendar in my own handwriting.
The following call came while I was drying dishes. Tessa answered, listened, and held out the receiver. "It's Mom. For you." Then she went back to what she had been doing. Nothing dramatic had changed in the room. For the first time in a while, that seemed like evidence of something working.