Walter never once defended himself past the truth.
“You’re allowed to be angry,” he said, every time. “Take as long as you need. I’m not going anywhere. That’s the one promise I can actually keep now.”
And he kept it.
Every week. Coffee, then dinners, then Sunday afternoons where Ellie taught him card games and he taught her how to make the truck’s soft-serve machine work.
My mother and I had our own reckoning.
That was harder, honestly, than the one with Walter.
She’d raised me. She’d been there for everything. And she’d also stolen my father and handed me a gravestone that didn’t exist.
We’re still working on it.
But at Thanksgiving this year — the first one — she and Walter sat at the same table for the first time in twenty-five years, two old people who’d once torn each other apart, passing the potatoes with the careful politeness of people who have finally run out of anger and found only tiredness and grandchildren underneath.
