Anna shook her head. Something changed in Anna’s face—something that had been held there for a long time.
“I never wanted you to know,” Anna said.
“I know.”
“Not because I was hiding it. Because I wanted her to be what she was in that card. The grandmother who sends postcards. I wanted that to be enough.”
“It was enough. For a long time it was.”
“And now?”
Bea looked at her mug. The chamomile. The blue cup from when she was twelve. Her mother’s kitchen with her paintings on the wall and the lemon soap and the toast smell and seventeen years of being held by exactly this person.
“Now I know,” she said. “And I’d rather know. Even though knowing hurts.” Her eyes filled. “I’d rather know who she is than keep hoping she’s someone else.”
Anna reached across the table and took Bea’s hand. She didn’t squeeze. She just held it.
They sat for a long time. The tea went cold. The morning light moved from the window to the wall to the edge of the table where their hands were.
After a while Bea said, “She said she’s coming to the show.”
“She actually said that?”
“Twice.”
Anna didn’t say anything. Her palm stayed on Bea’s.
“I want to believe her,” Bea said. “I’m just not sure I do.”
Anna looked at her daughter and held her hand.
“Then we’ll see,” Anna said.
“I’m going to go sketch for a while,” Bea said, setting her mug on the counter on her way up.
“Okay.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for letting me go. And thank you for being here when I came back.”
She got up and crossed to the other side of the table, and Anna stood and hugged her.
Bea whispered, “I love you so much, Mom.”
Anna’s breath hitched, but she managed to say, “I love you too, Bea. So so much, and I’m really proud of you.”
Anna watched her daughter go upstairs with her sketchbook under her arm and her shoulders straight and her face calm, and she thought about how steady a person can look when they've just set something heavy down in the one place it's safe to leave it.
She sat at the table for a long time after Bea's door closed.
Then she put her face in her hands and cried. Not for Bea—Bea was going to be fine. For herself. For the ten-year-old who set the table because Sam wasn't there to do it. For the teenager who stopped calling her Mom. For every year she'd spent being steady and present and enough, wondering if she was doing it right, wondering if the reason she tried so hard was because she was terrified of becoming the woman who left.
She'd done better. She'd done so much better. And hearing her daughter say thank you for being here had cracked open the place where she'd been keeping all of it.
After a while she wiped her eyes. She felt lighter.
