The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

We did not talk for a while.

Then my mother said, not turning from the window, “I didn’t know about the Vetter woman.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t tell you about the work.”

“Why not?”

I thought about it. I dried a glass and set it in the rack. “Because every time I tried, you called it playing nurse,” I said. “So I stopped trying.”

She did not argue with that. That is as close as my mother has ever come to admitting a thing, the not arguing.

She washed the last glass and handed it to me and I dried it, and she let the water out of the sink, and we stood and listened to it gurgle down, and she said, in a voice I had not heard from her since I was a very small child, a voice with no performance in it at all, “Your father used to say you were the one who’d be all right. I never understood what he meant. I thought he meant money. He didn’t mean money.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t mean money.”

“I don’t know how to do what you do,” she said. “The sickroom. I never could. It scares me down to the ground. I think maybe I told myself it wasn’t worth anything because I couldn’t do it.” She dried her hands on her apron, slow. “That’s a sin, I expect. Making a small thing out of what you can’t do yourself so you don’t have to feel it.”

It was not an apology. But it was the truest thing my mother ever said to me, and I have decided to let it be enough, because I am forty-one and I have sat with enough dying people to know that you do not get the perfect ending, you get the real one, and the real one is almost always smaller and quieter than the one you wanted, and you take it, and you are grateful, because the alternative is to die holding a grudge against a glass of warm dishwater.

“Mom,” I said. “I’m not unsettled.”

She looked at me.

“I settled a long time ago,” I said. “I settled right here. I just settled into something you couldn’t see a title on.”

She nodded. She did not say I’m sorry. But she reached over and she tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, which she had not done since I was maybe nine years old, and her hand was warm and wet from the dishwater, and that was my mother’s apology, and I took it.

I want to tell you one more thing, because it is the thing that actually matters, and it is the reason I can tell this whole story without bitterness.

I have a thing I built. I never called it building anything, because it did not feel like building, it felt like Saturdays. But Earl was right that there are a lot of us, and the reason there are a lot of us is that eleven years ago I started something.