The lunch was at my mom’s house, the kind of Sunday meal where someone always cries or someone always says something they can’t take back. This time it was both.
Owen had been home for three weeks by then — actually home, sleeping in his own apartment for the first time since January — and the occasion was our grandmother’s eighty-third birthday, which meant extended family crammed around a table that was two folding tables pushed together and covered with a tablecloth that had a coffee stain my mother had been trying to hide since 1999. Max and Ella were there, still in the habit of gravitating toward me whenever someone new came into a room, which I’d stopped noticing until one of Owen’s cousins commented on it.
“They really love their aunt,” she said.
“She’s just the babysitter,” Owen said. And then he laughed, like it was a joke, like the word “just” wasn’t doing the work it was doing.
I heard myself say something light and unmemorable. I passed the rolls. I kept my face exactly where it needed to be.
But I had an expense spreadsheet on my phone that said something different. I had a school contact list where my name appeared next to Owen’s. I had twenty-six weeks of mornings and drop-offs and dentist reschedulings and one long Friday afternoon in the pediatrician’s waiting room with a six-year-old who had strep and wanted her mother and her mother was two hours away and her father didn’t answer his phone.