What He Said
Then my quiet son said the thing I had waited a year and a half to hear, and maybe longer than that.
“I should have said something sooner, Mom. The first trip. Any of them. I told myself it was between you two. It wasn’t. It was me not wanting to be in the middle. So I just left you out there by yourself.”
I could not say anything for a minute. I reached over and put my hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, the way I used to when he was little and could not sleep.
“You didn’t leave me by myself,” I said finally. “You brought them here. Every Sunday. Without me asking. That’s not nothing, Ryan.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s a start,” I said. “Everything is a start.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, quick, so Addie would not see. I pretended I did not see either.
“I’m not her,” I said. “That other woman. I don’t want to run anybody’s life. I just wanted to be in one picture. That’s all I ever wanted. One picture, somewhere, with all of you.”
“I know,” he said. “I think Brooke knows, too. She just doesn’t know how to come back from it.”
“She doesn’t have to know how,” I said. “She just has to come.”
The Fall Trip
I did not hear any more about it for two Sundays. The kids came, and they fished, and Addie caught three more bluegill and Beau caught his first one, which he insisted on kissing before he let it go.
Then, on the first Sunday in July, Ryan told me something while we were cleaning fish at the picnic table by the shed.
Brooke had been planning another Disney trip for fall break. She had been saving for it all year. She had shown the kids the hotel on her laptop one night that week.
And Addie had looked at the screen for a long time and then said, “Can we just go to Grandma’s pond instead?”
Beau had said, “Yeah. Grandpa Steve lives there.”
Ryan said Brooke had not said anything at all. She had shut the laptop and gone out and sat in her car in the driveway for twenty minutes, and when she came back in, her eyes were red.
“She’s not mad,” Ryan said, scraping scales off a bluegill with the back of a knife. “I don’t think she’s mad. I think she just heard it.”
I did not say anything. There was nothing I could say that would not sound like crowing, and I did not want to crow. I felt sorry for her, if you want the truth.
That night I prayed for Brooke, by name, for the first time in a long time without any hurt in it. I prayed she would find her way to the water. That was all.