I spend more time helping my son with his homework than I spent on my own homework when I was in high school. Every day we come home and do homework until it’s time for bed.

One night I help him with French reading comprehension. It is a slow and laborious process. He reads a sentence out loud. I say, “Okay, so what did that mean?” He says, “I don’t know.” Sometimes I just want to tell him, it would be faster if I just did it for him, but I don’t do that. We go through the sentence word by word, defining each one. I make him look up the ones he doesn’t know, which is almost all of them.

My shoulders are aching. There is an invisible string running from the crown of my head to the ceiling, maybe a spiderweb. It’s so fragile, and it’s the only thing holding me up. My son is tired, too. His voice slow and choppy. Neither one of us wants to be doing homework right now. I yawn and stretch and then I hear a sound.

“Eliot,” I say, “are you purring?”

“No,” he says, annoyed that I’m asking such a stupid question, “it’s Sirius.”

I look down to see a soft, glossy cat wedged between us on the couch. His eyes are almost completely closed and his ears stick straight up into the air. His front paws rest gently on the couch, pointing slightly towards each other. For him, this is a perfect moment.