“Is it that bad?” I wondered out loud. “What is so interesting on your phone?”

She put down her device and glanced up at me with an imposed-upon look and replied wearily, “Excuse me! What did you want to talk about?”

I was stumped. There was nothing I wanted to talk about . . . other than perhaps to say something like ‘I wish I was engaged with something as fully as you are engaged with your phone.’

So, instead I said, “Are you angry with me?”

“No,” she barked back at me. “At least not until this moment. I am just catching up with my Facebook feed. Does that bother you? If it does, I will stop and we can talk.”

Now I am suddenly afraid that she is going to expect me to engage her in a serious, committed conversation. I do not want that; that would be so boring.

“No, don’t. Finish what you are doing. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Listen, Honey, there is nothing more important to me than you. It’s just that I had nothing to do and you said you were going go downstairs into your ‘Man Cave’ and watch the ballgame. So I picked up my phone and opened up Facebook.”

“Right,” I said as I walked toward the stairs, “sorry, I do want to watch that game. Do you mind?”

She let out a big sigh and said, “No, not at all.”

As I looked back over my shoulder at her, I noticed she was in the kitchen putting on her apron. Her phone rested by itself on the arm of the couch.