She put the folder down and didn’t open it, and I told her before she could ask. He wasn’t working in Erie that year. He was in a facility outside Sharon from January of ’15 to March of ’16, court-ordered after the second charge, and the seven words I wrote were after a long illness, surrounded by family — which covered a lot of ground and was, on the day I typed it, the only sentence I could imagine my mother reading. She was in hospice. She’d had two strokes. I made a decision at a kitchen table at one in the morning and then I lived inside it for nine years.
She said okay and sat there for a while. Then she said she’d known something since she was seventeen, because her mother had let a sentence slip in an argument and had never explained it, and she’d spent nine years assembling a shape out of things nobody would say out loud. She said the worst part hadn’t been the not-knowing. It was that everyone around her clearly knew, and had agreed on a story, and she’d grown up as the only person in the family who wasn’t in on it.
I told her everything. The whole fourteen months, the charges, what he’d done and what he hadn’t, the visits I made and the ones I didn’t. It took about two hours and she asked good questions and she didn’t cry until near the end, and when she did it was about something small — that he’d been in there on his birthday and nobody went.
She’s not angry at me. She said so twice, unprompted, which I think means she’s decided to be generous rather than that she isn’t. What she asked for was the thing I should have offered years ago: she wants to write it down, the real version, for herself and for her own kids someday, and she wants me to sit with her while she does it. We start next month. The obituary is still up on the funeral home’s site. She said leave it — that two hundred people can keep the seven words, and she’ll have the folder.
