“I’m sorry.” The words are so inadequate, they border on foolish.
She nods. “I know.” She shrugs and then lets out a small, choked laugh. “I know you are. But that doesn’t really help right now.”
She opens the front door.
“Take care of yourself, Fox,” she tells me.
Not take care.
Not the shorthand version.
The full thing, specific and direct and—I don’t know why this is the part that gets me, why this particular instruction from a woman I have spent months convincing myself I am not in love with is the thing that makes the stone in my chest become briefly unbearable—it sounds like something you say to a person you are choosing to stop being responsible for.
The epiphany hits.
She cared for me in ways I didn’t see, didn’t ask for, and didn’t deserve.
She was responsible for me, and she is handing that back now, and I find I don’t know what to do with my own upkeep.
The door closes.
I stand in the hall and listen to her car start, and I listen to it back out of the drive, and I listen to it go until I can’t hear it anymore.
Then I listen to the silence of our very large house, where I have lived for most of my adult life, and it has never before felt like a reproach as it does now.
My phone rings fifteen minutes later. I spring to where I left it in the hallway, thinking it’s her, she’s calling, she’s asking to come back.
Disappointed to see who it is, I answer.
“Mother.”
I walk back to the kitchen with my phone and empty my glass of wine in one go.
“Archibald, I called you twice today, and you did not call back.”
I look out at the garden lights catching her fig tree, the herbs along the left wall, the peonies my mother called boring, which have come in full and riotous and entirely indifferent to anyone’s opinion. It’s all extremely on-brand for Lucy.
“I’m sorry,” I reply automatically. I am not even remotely sorry, but I prefer tomanagemy mother rather than educate her that she’s not the center of my universe, as she likes to think she is.
“Dinner Sunday. The usual time. We have some guests, old friends of your father visiting from Atlanta, and I need numbers.”
The way she says it.Hisfriends, not hers. Mother has always been precise about who the people in her life belong to. Not many areher people.
“I’ll be there.”
“Good. And Lucy?—“
“She won’t be there.”
A pause. That’s her recalibrating to fathom what’s going on. “Why not?”
Because she’s gone. Because I hurt her. Because I fucked up. Because I didn’t love her….
“We’re getting divorced.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Oh, Archibald.” There’s relief in her voice, like she’s exhaling for the first time freely since she found out about Lucy. “I’m so sorry, darling.”
