Liam.

His mother works at a roadside restaurant in the Great Smoky Mountains, six hours from Asheville. Once a month, Liam takes the van and drives out there. Six hours of interstate, tolls, gas stations where he buys black coffee and keeps going. Some people listen to podcasts to pass the time. Liam drives in silence. He uses the drive to think about the things he doesn't know how to say out loud.

The last time he arrived at night, the house smelled stale. His mother was asleep on the sofa in her clothes. Liam didn't wake her. He opened all the windows, even though it was cold. He got out a pan, cleaned the counter, made soup with what he found in the fridge — potato, onion, a bit of chicken that was still good. When his mother woke up, the soup was hot and Liam was already checking the bathroom pipe that had been dripping for three weeks.

That's how it goes. Liam doesn't say "I'm worried about you." He says "I brought you soup" or "that faucet can be fixed, I can look at it if you want." He learned it during the four months he spent caring for her when respiratory problems forced her to stop, and since then his way of caring for people is always physical, never verbal. He cooks. He repairs. He leaves things on porches without warning.

Some distances weigh more than the miles. Liam knows them well: six hours to the Smokies, seven thousand five hundred kilometers to Marseille. [Bruno, the praying mantis](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/bruno/), is probably the person he talks to most outside of West Asheville. They met on a craft fermentation forum. They exchange packages of ingredients and voice messages every two or three weeks. Bruno sent him a recording from the Marseille market; Liam listens to it while he works in the workshop, among sacks of malt and the smell of fresh hops.

Sometimes Liam thinks Bruno lives with more intensity — the concerts, the Mediterranean, the Marseille nights. Bruno thinks exactly the opposite. Neither of them has said it out loud, but it shows in the silences of the voice messages, in the things they don't tell, in the way both of them avoid direct questions about how they're doing.

What Liam puts in the backpack when he leaves the house says quite a lot about how he understands the day: a water bottle, the workshop keys, his phone with Bruno's voice messages loaded for the road, and sometimes a bag of ingredients for someone in the neighborhood who asked three days ago. Nothing extra. Nothing missing. He loads what's needed and takes it where it needs to go.