Chapter 6: The Things That Needed Saying
We stayed for two hours that first morning.
We didn't solve anything.
We didn't try to.
Goldi made tea in a small kitchen that had a grab rail fitted beside the stove, and Leo stood in the doorway and talked to her about his job — he'd started part-time at a garden centre the month before — and I watched her face while he spoke.
She listened the way people listen when they have been hungry for something for a very long time and cannot quite believe it's real.
When we sat back down, I asked her about the illness.
Not to fill silence.
Because I needed to know.
"Stage three," she said.
"Breast cancer.
They caught the spread early enough.
The chemotherapy was — it was hard.
The second round especially." She turned her teacup in her hands.
"The memory problems came after.
The oncologist said it was a known side effect.
Chemo brain, they call it.
Most people recover fully.
I recovered mostly."
"What does mostly mean?"
"It means some mornings I wake up and I have to look at the photographs to remember the order of things." She said it without drama, the way you say something you have made peace with.
"It means I write everything down.
It means Patricia — my nurse — checks in on me.
It means I am careful."
"Are you safe here alone?"
She looked at me with an expression I remembered from twenty years ago — patient, slightly amused, entirely certain of herself.
"Arthur.
I am sixty-one years old.
I have survived things that would have flattened most people.
I am safe."
"I know you are," I said.
"I'm asking anyway."
Something shifted in her face.
"Yes," she said, more quietly.
"I'm safe."
Leo set his mug down.
"I want to come back," he said.
"Not as a visit.
Regularly.
If that's — if you want that."
Goldi looked at him for a long moment.
"Leo.
You don't owe me anything."
"I know," he said.
"That's not why I'm asking."
She pressed her lips together.
Nodded once, quickly, before she could change her mind.
"I'd like that," she said.
I drove home that afternoon — we had walked there but Mrs.
Johnson had come to collect us, appearing at the blue door at noon with no explanation and a tin of biscuits, which made Goldi laugh in a way that told me they had done this before — and I sat in the passenger seat while Leo rode in the back and Mrs.
Johnson drove with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been waiting a very long time to make a particular right turn.
"You knew this would happen," I said to her.
"I hoped," she said.
"There's a difference."
"How long have you been hoping?"
"Since the day she moved into that house." She kept her eyes on the road.
"I told her it was too close.
She said that was the point."
That night, after Leo had gone to bed, I went to the drawer in the kitchen.
The Mother's Day card was still there.
Eleven years old now, the envelope slightly yellowed at the corners.
I had bought it in the hospital gift shop the week Leo was born, in a fog of exhaustion and grief and something I couldn't name, and I had never sent it because I didn't know where to send it, and then later because I was too angry, and then later still because it had simply become part of the furniture of my life — the thing in the drawer that I never looked at directly.
I took it out.
I read what I had written inside, twenty-one years ago.
*For the mother of my son.
Wherever you are.*
May you like
I sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
Then I put the card in my jacket pocket.
