…and the laughter trailed off, the way it does when someone stands a little too straight in a doorway. I wasn’t shaking. I’d done my crying two Sundays before, and I was done with it.
“I won’t keep you long from your dinner,” I said. “I just have some news, and I wanted to tell you all together.” I’d spent those two weeks of recovery doing more than resting. I had signed a lease — not on the assisted-living place my son had been circling like it was settled, but on a bright little apartment across town, in a community for people my age, with a garden plot and a book club and a woman down the hall who already feels like a friend. “I move in Saturday,” I told them. “I wanted to thank you, truly, for taking me in while my hip healed.”
My son’s face changed. He started to say something about it being sudden.
“It isn’t sudden,” I said gently. “I heard you, that night. You told your wife you wanted your lives back. So I’m giving yours back to you. And I’m taking mine back too — I’d forgotten, staying in that guest room, that I still had one of my own.”
He got up so fast his chair fell, and he was crying, saying he never meant it, he was tired, he was awful, he was sorry. I hugged my boy, because I will always hug my boy. But I did not unpack my bags.
That was eight months ago. I have a garden now, and Tuesday-night bridge, and my son calls me — really calls me — because I am a person he chose to talk to, not a problem in his spare room.
They wanted their lives back, and I gave it to them — and in doing so, I finally remembered that a woman who spent thirty years living for everyone else was still allowed a life of her own.