PART 69 — THE FIRST SENTENCE
Susan’s letter began with the funeral.
Not with Richard.
Not with her marriage.
Not with an explanation of how difficult her life had become.
Chloe,
I laughed when your father threw Margaret’s passbook onto her casket.
I have tried to write about everything else first.
I keep returning to that moment.
You were standing beside the grave of the person who had cared for you, and I helped him humiliate you.
I lowered the page.
For a moment, I could see it all again.
The wet ground.
The designer sunglasses.
The little laugh that had told everyone else it was safe to find my pain amusing.
I put the letter on the desk.
Then I stood and walked into the kitchen.
There were dishes in the sink.
A bowl drying upside down.
The ordinary relief of having somewhere else to go.
I filled a glass of water.
I did not make myself return immediately.
Nobody was waiting across from me.
Nobody could sigh and tell me I was taking too long.
When I sat down again, I began from the first line.
I know providing records later did not undo what I did before.
I know admitting things when there were consequences for denying them is not the same as having told the truth when it would have helped you.
I want to explain what I understood.
I do not expect the explanation to excuse me.
The words were measured.
Careful.
I wondered how many drafts she had written.
Then I reminded myself that careful wording could be sincere.
It could also be self-protective.
I did not have to decide which it was before reading the next sentence.
PART 70 — THE WOMAN WHO WANTED TO BE CHOSEN
Susan wrote about meeting Dad.
He had been attentive.
Funny.
Eager to hear about her work.
He told her he was lonely.
He told her he was raising a difficult daughter after losing a wife he had loved.
She wrote:
I wanted to be the person who made his life easier.
At the time, that sounded generous to me.
I did not examine why making his life easier so often required asking less of him and more of you.
I stared at the sentence.
There was something painful about reading my childhood as someone else’s gradual realization.
I had lived it in real time.
She had been standing beside it.
When you were upset, Richard said you were trying to make me leave.
When Margaret disagreed with him, he said she had never accepted anyone after Eleanor.
I wanted to believe the problem was that you could not accept me.
That belief gave me an excuse not to ask why you looked frightened when he entered a room.
I remembered an afternoon when I was eleven.
A broken mug.
Dad’s voice growing sharp.
Susan sitting at the table, looking at a magazine.
I had waited for her to say something.
Anything.
She did not.
Later, she told me I needed to stop pushing his buttons.
The phrase returned now with a force that made my hands cold.
His buttons.
As though I was operating a machine.
As though anger happened because I pressed the wrong part of him.
In the letter, she continued:
I made being accepted by him more important than being fair to you.
Then, after years of doing that, I began calling it loyalty.
It was easier to say I was loyal than to admit I had become comfortable watching someone else absorb the cost of my place in the family.
I rested my forehead against my hand.
She had found words for it.
That mattered.
It did not make the memories gentler.
PART 3-My grandmother’s savings passbook was deemed useless by my father, who threw it into her grave.
