"I know you would."
"He didn't deserve?—"
"I know," I say. "I know he didn't. I've met him. I know what he is and I know what he did and I understand why you made every decision you made." My voice stays level. "I'm not angry about James. I'm angry that you decided all of that for me before I was born and kept deciding it for twenty-six years and called it love."
"It was love."
"I know that too. It was love and it was control and you never let me tell the difference and that's the thing I can't get past."
Mom looks at the table. Her hands are shaking now, slightly, the small tremor she gets when she's held herself together too long. I've seen it twice in my life—once when her mother died and once when she thought I was in a car accident at seventeen and arrived at the hospital to find me sitting in a plastic chair with a sprained wrist and nothing else. Both times she held it until she couldn't.
I stop talking. I let her have the silence.
We runout of energy before we run out of things to say. That's how it ends—not with a resolution, not with the thing that fixes it, just with two people sitting across a kitchen table in someone else's house with their arguments exhausted and nothing clean on the other side of it.
Sydney's hands are still on the table, not shaking anymore, just resting. I'm looking at the grain of the wood.
"I should have told you the truth," she says. "You deserved to know your own story."
"Why didn't you?"
She's quiet for a moment. Long enough that I look up.
"Because I was ashamed," she says.
I wait.
"Not of the decision. I stand by that." She looks at her hands. "I'm ashamed of how far I went to make it permanent. Of telling him you didn't survive. Of building twenty-six years on top of that and never once—" She stops. Starts again. "If you knew allof it, you'd know what I was capable of when I was scared. And I didn't want you to know that about me."
The kitchen is very quiet.
I didn't see that coming. All the defenses I'd built for this conversation, all the responses I'd prepared for the things she was going to say—none of them were for that. For my mother, whom I have always understood as certain, telling me she was ashamed of what fear made her do.
I don't say anything. I sit with it.
She doesn't try to fill the silence and I don't either and the clock on the wall marks the quarter hour and neither of us moves.
Eventually I push backmy chair. I pick up my bag. I stand at the table for a moment looking at her and she looks back at me and she doesn't say anything else, doesn't reach for the next argument or the next defense, just sits there with her tea gone cold and her hands in her lap.
I walk to the doorway.
Then I stop.
"I'm not done being angry," I say.
"I know," she says.
I wait, half-turned, for the qualifier. For thebut,or thehowever,or the pivot back to her own side of it. It doesn't come. She just looks at me with her hands in her lap and waits.
"I'll be here," she says.
I look at her for a moment longer and then I go.
The drive home takes forty minutes and I spend most of it not thinking about the fight. I think about the strainer instead. The small loose-leaf strainer from the third drawer on the leftthat you wouldn't find without being shown. Olive knew she was coming. Olive showed her where things were. My mother sat in that kitchen and learned how to make the tea and waited for me to arrive, and when I left, she saidI'll be herewithout following me to the door or asking when I was coming back.
My mother, not running.
That's the thing I can't quite put down.
