Chapter 12: What Grew Back
Spring came slowly that year.
I noticed it the way I hadn't noticed seasons in a long time — the particular morning when the oak tree in the front yard showed its first green, the week the marigolds in the garden bed came back on their own from seed, the day I realized I had started leaving the windows open in the afternoon.
Lawrence flew in from Phoenix in April.
I had not expected to like him.
I had not expected to feel, sitting across from him at my kitchen table, that I was meeting a piece of Richard I could actually keep.
He was quieter than Richard.
Less certain of himself.
He had his brother's eyes but not his brother's need to fill every room he entered.
"This is strange," he said, looking around the kitchen.
"Yes," I said.
"Good strange," he said.
"I think."
We talked for three hours.
About Richard, and about the parts of Richard that had come from somewhere real — the way he could make anyone feel like the most important person in the room when he wanted to, the way he had loved his children, fiercely and genuinely, even while he was lying to everyone around them.
About the things Lawrence missed and the things he didn't.
"Do you hate him?" Lawrence asked me.
I thought about it honestly.
"No," I said.
"I'm angry.
I think I'll be angry for a long time.
But hate takes more energy than I have left for him."
Lawrence nodded.
"That sounds right."
Before he left, he handed me an envelope.
Inside was a photograph — Richard as a young man, maybe twenty, standing in front of a car with his arm around a boy who must have been Lawrence.
Both of them squinting into the sun.
Richard laughing at something off-camera.
"I thought you might want it," Lawrence said.
"Or not.
Either way."
I looked at the photograph for a long time.
"Thank you," I said.
I put it in the drawer with the other photographs.
Not in front.
Not thrown away.
Somewhere in the middle, where complicated things belong.
---
Patrice called once, in March.
I almost didn't answer.
Then I did.
"I just wanted to say," she said, "that I hope you're all right."
"I'm getting there," I said.
"Me too." A pause.
"I sold the house."
I hadn't expected that.
"Where will you go?"
"My sister's, for now.
Then I don't know." Another pause.
"I keep thinking about what he took from both of us.
The years.
The — the version of things we thought was real." Her voice was careful, like she was choosing each word.
"I don't expect you to forgive me.
I'm not asking for that.
I just wanted you to know that I'm sorry.
For my part in it."
I sat with that for a moment.
"I believe you," I said.
It wasn't forgiveness.
It wasn't friendship.
But it was the truth, and the truth was what we both had left.
---
In May, I signed up for a watercolor class at the community center.
It had been on a list in my head for thirty years — one of those things that had never been the right time, never been practical, never been something Richard would have seen the point of.
The instructor was a woman named Bev, seventy-three years old, with paint permanently under her fingernails and an opinion about everything.
"You've never painted before?" she said, looking at my first attempt.
"Never," I said.
"Good," she said.
"That means you haven't learned any bad habits yet."
I went back every Tuesday.
---
On a Saturday in June, I drove to the cemetery alone.
I had been before, with the children, in those first weeks.
But this was different.
This was just me, in Richard's truck — my truck now, I supposed — with a bunch of marigolds from the garden.
I stood at the grave for a while.
I didn't say much.
There wasn't much left to say that hadn't already been said in lawyers' offices and storage units and late-night kitchen conversations with my children.
But I said one thing.
"I learned to drive," I told him.
"I'm pretty good at it."
Then I laid the marigolds down and walked back to the truck.
I adjusted the mirrors.
I checked the GPS — I had deleted the saved addresses and entered only one: home.
My home.
The address I had lived at for thirty-eight years, that was mine now in every way it should always have been.
I started the engine.
I drove.
---
*Sometimes the life we thought we had turns out to be smaller than the one we were capable of living.
Carol didn't lose everything when she lost Richard — she found out what she was made of when no one was managing her anymore.*
Have you ever discovered something that changed how you understood your past — and found a way to move forward anyway?
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