The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

What Eileen Didn’t Know

I made her come in. You do not leave a crying widow on a cold step, no matter what her son has done, and none of this was ever Eileen’s doing.

I sat her at my kitchen table, the same table where I had written out that carpool slip. I put the kettle on and I cut us both a piece of the sour cream raisin pie even though it was four in the afternoon.

“It was never about you,” I told her. “I want you to know that. Not one bit of it.”

“You lost Ron and you are rattling around that house alone and of course you should have a reliable car. If Greg had come to me and said, Lori, let’s get Mom the Equinox and find you something, I would have driven to the lot that same day and helped pick it out.”

“It was the not asking. He gave away a thing of mine to settle a worry of his and he never once said my name in the deciding of it.”

Eileen nodded into her tea. “His father did the same,” she said quietly. “Ron would decide a thing in his own head and announce it like weather. I spent forty-six years being told what we were doing.”

She looked up. “I used to swear I’d teach that boy better. I guess I taught him exactly what I lived with.”

That undid something in me. I had been carrying this all week like a hard little stone, and it cracked right there at the table over pie.

I saw she was not just sorry about the car. She was sorry about a whole life of being decided for, and she was watching it land on me next, and she could not stand it.