Chapter 7: What Riley Still Hadn't Said
It was Riley who brought it up.
Sunday afternoon.
Tom had taken Max to the park.
I was in the kitchen trying to do something useful with the leftover rice from the night before, and Riley came downstairs and sat at the table and said, "Can I tell you something?"
"Always," I said.
I turned the heat down on the pan.
"Gran asked me to do something else," she said.
"Besides the tattoo."
I turned around.
Riley had her hands around a mug of tea she'd made without me noticing.
She was looking at the table.
"She wrote you a letter," she said.
"Last spring.
She gave it to me and asked me to give it to you after.
She said — she said she didn't want to give it to you herself because you'd read it while she was still there and she didn't want to watch your face."
My heart was doing something strange.
"I've had it since April," Riley said.
"It's been in the box.
Under the cards."
"You've had it for — "
"I know." She looked up.
"I'm sorry.
She said to wait until you were ready.
And you weren't ready.
You were — you were barely sleeping.
And then the funeral, and the invoice, and Dad's hours, and I kept thinking — not yet.
Not yet." Her voice cracked slightly.
"I didn't know when yet was."
"It's okay," I said.
"Is it?"
"Riley." I sat down across from her.
"You've been carrying this since April.
You carried it through the whole summer, through the diagnosis getting worse, through the last few months, through the funeral.
You carried it and you kept it safe and you waited until you thought I could hold it." I shook my head.
"That's not something you apologize for."
She pressed her lips together.
"Where is it?" I asked.
She got up and went upstairs.
I heard her moving around above me.
I sat at the kitchen table and looked at my hands and thought about my mother sitting somewhere in April, writing words she couldn't say to my face.
Riley came back down with an envelope.
It was sealed, my name on the front in my mother's handwriting.
She set it on the table between us.
"Do you want me to stay?" she asked.
I looked at the envelope.
Then I looked at Riley.
"Yes," I said.
"If you don't mind."
She sat back down.
I opened it carefully, the way you open something you know you can only open once.
The letter was two pages.
My mother's handwriting, slightly shakier than the cards from earlier years but still unmistakably hers — still careful, still the letters not quite touching.
I won't write all of it here.
Some of it is mine.
But there was one part I read out loud, because I felt Riley needed to hear it too.
*I know you think I was brave.
I wasn't.
I was just very good at deciding what to do with fear.
There's a difference.
You are the same, whether you know it or not.
You got it from me and I got it from my mother and it goes back further than either of us can see.
It is not a small thing to pass on.
Don't let anyone tell you it is.*
I stopped reading.
Riley's eyes were wet.
She didn't wipe them.
She just let them be wet, sitting there at the kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, and I thought — there it is.
There's the grief she didn't show at the funeral.
It had been in her all along, waiting for the right room.
"She was right," Riley said.
"About you."
"She was right about you too," I said.
We sat there for a long time.
May you like
The rice burned a little on the stove.
Neither of us moved to fix it.
