I understood what she didn’t finish: she didn’t want to make it harder for Victor, who had built something and had a vision for it and was not good at being told his vision was flawed. Making it easier for Victor was the thing Elaine had been doing for forty years of marriage. It was not a bad thing to be, in the ordinary course of a life. In this specific case, it had cost me something, and she knew it, and she was saying so.
“I made the choice I made,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
I thought about this. “I’m better than I was. I’m starting something that’s actually mine in a way the last eighteen years weren’t, and I can see now that that matters.”
She nodded. Not a performing nod. She was processing something.
We finished the kitchen together. She washed and I dried, the way we have divided that task since I was tall enough to reach the dish rack. We didn’t say much more. We didn’t need to.
It wasn’t a full accounting. It wasn’t the conversation that settled everything. It was my mother, who had spent forty years maintaining family peace at other people’s expense, acknowledging that she had made a choice and that the choice had had a cost. This is not nothing. It is also not everything. I have decided I can hold both.
December, the New Desk, and What It Felt Like
I started at Pinnacle the first Monday of December.