“Yes,” Eleanor said. “It is.”
“And I’ve watched this happen before. To Anna. To Tyler. To Meg. I watched them figure it out one at a time and there was nothing I could do about it then and there’s nothing I can do about it now.” She put it on the table. “And I’m terrified of watching it happen to Bea and Stella.”
The room was quiet for a moment. The curtain at the sliding door shifted in the breeze.
“What I keep thinking about,” Margo said, “is Anna. How Anna is handling this. She told Bea it was her decision. She didn’t warn her. She didn’t try to stop her. She just—let her go.”
“That’s hard,” Letty said.
“That’s mothering,” Nadine said.
“That’s what I mean.” Margo looked down at her hands. “I don’t know where Anna learned it. Not from Sam. Sam couldn’t stay in a room long enough to teach anybody anything. And I wasn’t—I did what I could, but I was making it up as I went.”
Eleanor leaned forward slightly. “Margo. We’re not doing the Sam conversation again. We did that. You know what we think.”
“I know.”
“Good. So I’m going to say the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“Anna didn’t learn from Sam. She learned from watching you show up every single day for years. She learned from you packing lunches and standing at the stove and being there every morning when Sam wasn’t. That’s where she learned it.”
Margo didn’t say anything.
Letty reached across and put her hand on Margo’s arm.
“Anna is what you made, Margo,” Letty said softly. “She’s letting Bea go because she’s secure enough to. And she’s secure because of you.”
Margo closed her eyes.
She’d had a deflection lined up—she could feel it in her throat, some version of that’s kind of you to say. But Letty’s hand was on her arm and the room was quiet and she couldn’t get the sentence out.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” she said.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” Eleanor said. “You just have to hear it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Then that’s today’s work.”
They sat with it for a moment.
Nadine ate a cracker and said, “You’re different tonight, Margo. And I don’t think it’s just about Sam.”
Margo swirled her wine. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Nadine ate another cracker and said nothing, which was Nadine’s way of saying she’d bring it up again later.
Then Vivian, who had been waiting, cleared her throat.
“On a completely unrelated note,” she said. “I have to tell you about my physical therapist.”
Margo raised her eyebrows.
“He put his hand on my shoulder blade this morning and I made a noise I am not proud of. He knows me by name now. I can’t go back. I have to switch practices.”
“What kind of noise?” Eleanor asked.
