Chapter 12
That evening, after Sadie went to sleep, Mabel and I sat on the repaired porch.
The blue tarp was gone.
The wall had been painted a soft white.
Fireflies moved beyond the yard.
“I owe you an apology,” I said.
“For the drum?”
“For several decades.”
Mabel looked at me.
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“I blamed my family for a while.”
“You had reason.”
“Yes. But Ruth’s letters didn’t make me leave you when I was eighteen.”
“No.”
“They didn’t make me disappear after the tavern.”
“No.”
“I did those things.”
“Yes.”
There was something freeing about hearing her say it.
Not cruelly.
Not to punish me.
Simply because it was true.
“I was afraid of needing someone,” I said. “I thought independence meant never allowing another person enough importance to change my plans.”
Mabel watched the fireflies.
“And now?”
“Now I think that might just be another way of being afraid.”
She smiled faintly.
“You always did take a long route to simple conclusions.”
“Twenty-six years, apparently.”
I turned toward her.
“I’m sorry I left you.”
She looked at me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come back.”
Her eyes shone, but she did not look away.
“And I am especially sorry that four years ago, when I got one unexpected chance to be honest with you, I ran before breakfast.”
“That one was particularly irritating.”
“I deserve that.”
“You do.”
“I don’t expect forgiveness because I apologized.”
“I know.”
“I don’t expect us to become what we were.”
“We can’t.”
That hurt.
Then she continued.
“We’re not those people anymore.”
I waited.
Mabel looked toward the window where Sadie’s night-light cast a soft glow behind the curtain.
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
I did not kiss her that night.
I wanted to.
Instead, I asked, “Would you have dinner with me Friday?”
“We eat together all the time.”
“No Sadie. No Lydia. No accounting records. No discussions about roof contractors.”
Mabel’s smile grew.
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“Yes.”
“You’re forty-four years old and you look terrified.”
“I negotiated a nine-hundred-million-dollar merger without shaking.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Yes. I’m terrified.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“It means you understand that I can say no.”
I nodded.
She let me suffer for another few seconds.
“Friday,” she said.
Our first date in twenty-six years was at a Mexican restaurant forty miles away where nobody knew us.
The enchiladas were too salty.
The air-conditioning was too cold.
Mabel laughed when I spilled salsa on my cuff.
It was perfect.
Not because it recreated the past.
Because it did not.
We talked about who we had become.
She told me she had once considered moving to New Mexico.
I told her I hated golf despite having pretended to enjoy it for twenty years because wealthy businessmen seemed expected to.
She confessed that she still had every terrible poem I wrote her in high school.
I offered to purchase them for immediate destruction.
She refused.
“You can afford almost anything,” she said.
“Apparently not those poems.”
“Never.”
Our relationship grew in ordinary pieces.
Coffee.
Dinner.
School enrollment forms.
Arguments about schedules.
Sunday afternoons.
The first time Mabel came to Houston with me, she did not stay at my house.
She booked her own hotel.
I understood.
The second time, she stayed.
A year after the truth came out, Ruth sent Mabel a handwritten letter.
Not through me.
Not through an attorney.
She apologized without explaining herself.
Mabel read it twice.
Then put it away.
“Are you going to answer?” I asked.
“Eventually.”
“Do you forgive her?”
Mabel considered the question.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s fair.”
Several months later, she agreed to have coffee with Ruth.
I did not ask what they discussed.
May you like
Some things were not mine to manage.
Grant resigned from financial control of the family business.
