They came on a Saturday afternoon in late March, when the light had just begun to carry the first suggestion of spring. That thin tentative warmth that makes Columbus feel briefly possible after a long winter. I saw the car from the kitchen window. Cynthia’s silver Honda pulling into the driveway with the deliberate slowness of people who have rehearsed the approach. I set down my coffee cup.
I did not move to the door immediately. I took a breath the way James had once told me to do before any difficult conversation. slow, deliberate, complete. I let them knock twice before I answered. They were dressed carefully. Cynthia in a soft blue sweater, her hair down. She usually wore it pulled back, and I noticed the change immediately, the way it was meant to be noticed, as a signal of openness, of vulnerability, of please let us in.
Derek was in the gray shirt I had given him for Christmas 2 years ago, and the recognition of that detail produced in me a feeling I refused to follow. ‘Mom,’ Derek said, ‘we just want to talk.’ I stepped back from the doorway. They came inside. We sat in the living room, my living room, with Roland’s bookshelves and the photograph above the mantle and the rug I had bought in Arizona in 1998.
Cynthia perched on the edge of the sofa as if she were a guest in a place she did not wish to seem to claim, which was of course the point. Derek began, ‘He was, I will give him this, a skilled performer when he needed to be.’ He spoke for 10 minutes about regret, about fear, about the pressure the money had put on him, about Cynthia’s difficult childhood, and how security had always meant something different to her than it did to most people.
He said things that in another context, at another time, might have moved me. He said he missed me. He looked at the floor when he said it, which was either genuine feeling or the accurate performance of it, and I was no longer in a position to tell the difference. Then Cynthia spoke, ‘Margaret,’ she said, and her voice was soft in a way it had never been in 10 years of living under the same roof with me.