Then I met Robert at a photography show in Santa Barbara. He was a retired history professor, widowed, with the kind of presence that does not crowd you—it accompanies you. We talked about photographs, then books, then music, then life. Nothing dramatic happened. We simply drifted, calmly and at our age honestly, into each other’s company. He never treated me like a broken woman or a tragic heroine. He treated me like Margaret. Curious. Whole. Worth knowing.
When he kissed me for the first time after a concert in the rain, I laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just that life has a very strange sense of humor.”
“Thank God for that,” he said.
My children reacted exactly like grown children do when they discover their mother is still fully a woman: surprise, protectiveness, and a little outrage. But they met Robert, and he won them over.
Then, slowly, something else unexpected happened. Emily met Chloe. Then Ryan. At first it was painful and awkward, but the girl herself was innocent and impossible not to see that way forever. Blood is stubborn. It finds connections morality never would have chosen.
When Thomas suffered a heart attack months later, we all ended up in the hospital waiting room together—Emily, Ryan, Vanessa, Chloe, and me. That was when the abstract girl became real in the flesh. Tall, nervous, dark-eyed. Emily hugged her first. Ryan took longer. I looked at her and said, “Don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel eighty.” She smiled, and somehow so did I.
When I went in to see Thomas, there was no longer hatred. Not love either. Only history. He cried. He said he had thought of our early years when he believed he might die. He asked if I was happy. I thought of Robert, my studio, my children, my grandchildren, the blue couch, the life I had rebuilt.
“Yes,” I told him. “More than I ever thought possible.”
He cried and said he was glad, even though it hurt.
“There are pains people earn,” I told him.