The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern
“I thought of your book.” He did not look up. “I told myself you’d never miss it. That you’d hate the heat, and be a worry the whole week. I told myself a lot of things, Mom. I got very good at it.”
“And the terminal?”
He shut his eyes. “I kept thinking I’d tell you. And I didn’t, and then we were at the curb, and I thought, if I leave her somewhere, she’ll call Fern. She’ll be fine. I’ll fix it when we’re back.”
“You kissed me on the forehead.”
“I know.”
“You folded the paper so I wouldn’t see.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t a thing you did in a panic, Randy. That was a plan.”
He said, very low, “Yes, ma’am.”
I looked at him a long time. I am eighty-one years old, and I have learned that you can love a person and still look straight at what they are.
“I’m not going to scream at you,” I said. “I never have and I won’t start. I want to tell you three things, and I want you to hear all three before you say a word.”
“All right.”
“The first. You did not make a mistake. A mistake is a wrong turn. You took my money by telling me what I wanted to hear, and you left your mother alone in a strange city, a woman who has never once left you anywhere. I am calling it by its name so you cannot call it by another.”
His shoulders moved.
“The second. I forgive you in the part of me that is a mother, because that part does not get a vote. But I do not trust you. You will earn that back an inch at a time, and some days I won’t be able to give it. You don’t get to decide when. I do.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The third. I’m not asking you to pay it all tomorrow. I want two hundred fifty dollars a month. The same as I saved. It took me a hundred and twenty months to put that money together. You can take as long to return it. I’ll be ninety-one when you finish. I intend to be here to see it.”
He made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else. “Mom.”
“And you will sit in the back at church and let people look at you, and you won’t explain. Whatever your children decide about you, you take it. You do not ask them to make it easy.”
He nodded. He was crying openly, with his face in his hands, and I let him. I did not go to him. I would like to say I did, but I will not lie in a story about being lied to.
After a while I said, “Randy. When you can say what you did to my face without the word but, without ‘I was behind’ and ‘I thought’ and ‘I meant to,’ my door is open to you. It is open now, to the man who can say it plain. I am not sure that man is you yet.”
He wiped his face on his sleeve like a boy. “I’ll try.”
“Trying is for the Lord,” I said. “You do it.”
He got up. At the bottom of the steps he turned.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And I let it be what it was, which was true and not enough.
The first envelope came the second week of December. Two hundred fifty dollars in a plain envelope in the mailbox, no note. The second came in January, the third in February. One month in March it was a hundred and ten dollars short, with a note that said Truck. I’ll make it up. He did, in April.