Daniel called two weeks later with an actual date. He was coming through for a conference in April of the following year and wanted to have dinner. I said fine. We agreed on a restaurant we’d both looked up online rather than one with family history. That felt right.
I didn’t tell him about the folder I’d kept, the job offer letter from nine years ago that I’d never thrown away. I looked at it again while I was sorting things to bring to the apartment. I turned it over in my hands. The salary they’d offered had been better than what I’d made in any year since. The position had almost certainly been filled many times over by people who’d stayed.
I put the letter in the kitchen drawer. Not in the folder, just in the drawer. A piece of evidence about a choice, filed where I could find it without having to think about it.
The question my brother’s invoice had forced me to answer was not whether twelve years had been worth it. I don’t think of my time with my mother in those terms. She was difficult and loving and complicated and she was my mother, and she is gone, and I miss her in ways that don’t translate into any accounting I could put in a folder.
The question was whether those years had happened, whether they had cost anything, whether the family story that had been telling itself in the background had any relationship to what was real.