And yet they’d stayed together, right to the bitter end. It was time to find out why.
Miriam flung the pillow off her head, taking in the shrine to her siblings once more, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
She found herself looking at her own face.
She hadn’t seen this wall from the doorway. The black and white head shot she’d submitted for the competition where she’d met Gus hung among a collage of others: snapshots of her at the piano and the state honor choir; the group photo from her liturgical music camp. A picture of her with Teo at St. Greg’s, and one with the kids playing on Christmas Eve. A shelf containing her festival cups lined up in a row in increasing order of size, and a shadowbox filled with high school blue ribbons. Recital programs.
It was a collection that spoke of love.
Footsteps padded on the tile; her mother entered the room. “Oh, Mira, you’re up. Good. Are you feeling better?”
Miriam couldn’t drag her eyes away from that wall. Her wall. “Um … yeah.” The Vicks smell centered around her mother, entwining with a whiff of cotton warmed in the oven. The smell of safety. Mom used to lather her with Vicks and pin warm cloth diapers inside her pajamas when she had a sore throat.
“You must have been really tired. It’s been hours,” Mom said.
“Haven’t been sleeping very well lately.”
“Well, I’m not surprised. I never sleep well away from my own bed.” Mom picked up the shoes Miriam had kicked off before collapsing in bed, and arranged them beside the door. “By the way, I cleaned out the car while you were sleeping. I stacked all the receipts on the kitchen table, so you can decide what you need to keep. You left your phone in the car too.”
“No, I didn’t, I …” She stared at the pink spangled phone case in her mother’s hand. Dicey’s phone. Dicey must have kicked it under the seat during a coughing fit.
Miriam snatched the phone from her mother’s hand. It was dead. She lunged for her charger and plugged it in.
“I have to get cooking,” Mom said. “Funeral dinner. You want to come out and talk?”
Obediently, Miriam unplugged Dicey’s phone and followed her mother out to the kitchen, where she reconnected the charger and laid the phone on the granite counter. She watched the deft motion of the knife in her mother’s hand, slicing through onions with great precision. The carrots on the counter sparked her memory. She knew this recipe.
She pulled out another cutting board and knife and started chopping alongside her mother. The silence grew heavier every second. Miriam cleared her throat. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. It’s been kind of …”
“Busy?”
“Emotional.”
“Yes, it must be very fulfilling to share your personal experience with the entire world.”
Miriam winced. “I didn’t share my personal experience with the entire world.”
“Well, you shared a lot more than you’ve shared with me.”
The words stung. Miriam scooped up a handful of carrots and dumped them in the pot. “I’m only just discovering a lot of things, Mom.”
“Like?”
“Like I love that girl.” Her voice caught. “I didn’t think I was capable of love anymore.”
Sallie stopped cutting. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because I’ve …” Miriam rested her hands on the board. She wished the phone would hurry up and power up. She longed for distraction. “For the past year, I’ve been trying to pretend I was this poster child for the perfect Catholic widow. But I’m not. I’m angry. When I was nineteen, I had all this energy, all this drive. I had goals, I had a future. And then the kids came along, and I had to divert all that into them instead.”
“That’s what happens when you become a mother.”
“You think I don’t know that? That’s what I told myself for years. I gave the best years of my life, Mom. All that energy, all that time. For what? Nothing. They’re dead. What was the point?” She slammed the butt of the knife on the granite. “A person who loved her family wouldn’t think things like that.”
Sallie’s eyes glistened. “Mira. Of course you loved your family.”
Miriam shook her head and sat down hard on a bar stool.
Her mother sat beside her and took both her hands. “Talk to me.”
She hadn’t confided in her mother in decades. The words came slowly, then faster and faster. “Teo loved me so much better than I could ever love him. He was my best friend. I liked living with him. But he deserved so much more, and I could never give it to him. He was this amazing romantic. He could make a gift out of—of wildflowers, for crying out loud.” The locket burned against her skin. “And all I did was run around and prepare meals and clean up after everyone and make sure they got to do whatever made them feel fulfilled.”
Her mother was smiling. “That sounds like love to me.”
And here was the heart of the matter. What pale shadow of love had her parents settled for all these years? Miriam wove her fingers into her hair and pulled, the physical pain dulling the deeper emotional one.
Sallie frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Miriam swallowed. “I don’t … know how to ask this.”
Sallie folded her arms. “Maybe you should just try spitting it out.”
The refrigerator cycled off. The house held its breath. “Okay,” Miriam said. “Why didn’t you and Dad ever get divorced?”
A split-second pause—just long enough to give the lie to the response. “What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Mom. You and Dad, talking about how miserable you were, but you’d put up with each other until I left
