He didn’t look up from his plate. His voice wasn’t cruel. That was the thing that hurt most about it. It was simply tired, the way you sound when you’re saying something you’ve been thinking for a long time.
“Mom,” he said, “when are you actually planning to move out? I mean, what’s the plan here?”
The table went quiet.
Renee looked down at her plate. Caleb put his phone on his lap. Sophie stopped mid-sentence.
I looked at my son. His hair was going gray at the temples, just like Harold’s had. He was 44 years old, and he was looking at me the way you look at a problem you haven’t been able to solve.
I set down the basket of rolls. I folded my napkin. I pushed back my chair and stood up.
“Excuse me,” I said.
And I walked away from the table.
I didn’t go to my room.
I went outside.
The backyard was cold that evening, the pool tarp pooling with the last of the winter rain. I sat in one of the patio chairs that nobody ever used, and I looked up at the sky, which was the dark orange and gray of a Phoenix evening, and I breathed.
I was not a woman who cried easily. Harold used to say I had the emotional architecture of a lighthouse, steady in bad weather, light visible from a distance, but not a warm place to be caught in a storm. He said it with affection.
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