“Was he open to being recorded?”
“You’re not understanding. I’d already plugged my phone charger into the outlet near the table, one of those wireless chargers where you just lay your phone against the plate. I pressed record on my voice memo app and set it down on the charger. It was obscured from his view by the lamp—not that he would have paid much attention to it anyway. Except I did hear in my own voice that tiny alteration, that trace of self-consciousness, that always occurs in the presence of some recording technology. Just as your face is always different in the presence of a camera. And I did wonder, despite myself, if he somehow could pick this up, if he would discover what I was doing—but surely that was just childish guilt or a regressive belief in the omniscience of the father or something. No, I didn’t tell him that I was recording, I have no real reason to think he suspected anything, and I just lobbed some questions at him about his past—‘ I can’t remember who cooked in your house growing up, was it only your mother?’—and then let him hold forth. And I did in fact feel strangely stabilized, comforted, by the presence of the device.
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