I sat back, keeping tight hold of her hand. “That’s it? After twenty-eight years, that’s your big maternal advice?”
My mother sniffed. “You’ve never in your whole life listened to whatother people had to say. Even your father. I trust you to make the right choice for you. Besides... It seems a little late for us to have the birth control talk.”
“We used birth control. Every time.”
“Nothing’s one hundred percent effective.” Her smile took a wry twist. “Your sister Meg proved that.”
I nodded. “When she got pregnant with the twins.”
“When I got pregnant with her.”
I goggled. “You didn’t... I never... I didn’t know.”
My mother folded her hands. “No one knew, except my mother. Well, Phee guessed when we moved the wedding date up. But she wouldn’t say a word that would reflect poorly on your father.”
I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. “You and Dad had to get married?”
“We didn’thaveto get married. We wanted to. I would have liked to finish college first, but I loved Ash so much. And we’d talked about starting a family together.” Another wry smile. “Just not so soon.”
“I’m not ready for marriage.”
“Mm.” My mother made a sound that might have been agreement. “Where is your baby’s father in all this?”
“In New York. It’s Eric. Eric Bhaer.”
She nodded. “From your blog.”
“I thought you didn’t read my blog.”
My mother sent me another of those new, sharp looks. “You’ve always been so independent. I didn’t want you to think I was stalking you online. But of course I read it. I’m your mother. So, have you told him yet?”
Him. Eric. I shook my head, humbled by her perception.
“Do you love him?”
Not a question my father would have asked.
“I didn’t mean to. I never expected... Ma, he’s such a good man. I wish you could meet him. I think you’d approve. He gets me. He accepts me.” At least, I thought he did. “But I don’t know how he fits into my life. Or if I could fit into his. He has two sons already. Teenagers.”
“Tell him,” my mother said. “If he’s as good a man as you say, he’ll support you whatever you decide. Just don’t let this stop you from doing what you want. Or rush you into something you’re not ready for.”
“Thanks, Momma.”
“Just remember, I’m here for you. You can stay at the farm as long as you want.”
“You could always come home,”my mother had said when I graduated from college. And again, when I lost my job. Her offers of support used to make me feel like she was waiting for me to fail. But now I heard them differently—not as an invitation to fall, but as a soft place to land.
“Just until I’m back on my feet,” I said.
My mother patted my hand again. “Guess we’ll be learning to walk together, you and me.”
Her words carried me through the week. For the first time, I could see where I came from leading clearly to the place I wanted to go. I wasn’t on my parents’ path, or my sisters’. I wasn’t following the map I’d made for myself in college.
But I was finally moving forward.
I was writing. Stories of the farm for the blog, usually with a food tie-in. Stories from our childhood that sometimes made it into the blog (#sistersfarm) and sometimes into a folder labeled simply “Chapters.”
I wrote on my mother’s laptop or in notebooks the way I used to do, sitting up in my attic room at night, filling the silence of the empty house with words. Not clever words. Words as plain as my mother’s blue glass bottle on the windowsill or useful as the pump in the yard. The ambient noise of the city was very far away. The sounds of the countryside were different, distinct and staccato—the creak of the stairs, the crack of a branch, a dog barking at an owl or a fox or at nothing at all. I was learning to be still and listen.
