Chapter 4: The Breaking of the Drought
The summer months passed with a profound, heavy silence. I didn't hear from Daniel or Marcus at all. Through the family grapevine—a cousin in Atlanta—I heard that Daniel and his wife had been forced to downsize to a townhouse because their credit had taken a hit from the failed house closing. I also heard that Marcus and Sandra had briefly separated, the financial strain of not having my wallet to fall back on finally exposing the cracks in their marriage.
It hurt to hear these things. A mother never wants to see her children struggle. But whenever the old urge to write a check flared up, I would go to my nightstand, trace the edges of Thomas’s handwriting on the envelope, and let the urge pass. I was no longer enabling their dysfunction. I was letting them grow up, even if it was twenty years late.
But it was Patrice who occupied my thoughts the most.
She hadn't been part of the ambush in my living room. She hadn't asked for money in months. Her last text message—"Mom, I've been thinking... I just wanted you to know I know it"—had lingered in my mind, unanswered. I was giving her space. I was giving myself space.
It happened in late September, right as the leaves on the maple tree in the front yard were beginning to turn a bruised, brilliant orange.
I was on the porch with Ruth, drinking iced tea, when a modest sedan pulled up to the curb. Not Patrice’s usual luxury SUV, but a smaller, older rental car. The driver’s side door opened, and Patrice stepped out.
She looked different. The polished, perfectly curated armor she usually wore was gone. She was wearing jeans and an old college sweatshirt, her hair pulled into a messy knot. She looked tired. She looked real.
Ruth, sensing the shift in the air, stood up and patted my shoulder. "I think I need to go check on my roast, Marion. Let me know if you need anything." She gave Patrice a polite nod as she walked down the steps and back to her own house.
Patrice walked slowly up the walkway, stopping at the bottom of the porch steps. She looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears she was desperately trying to hold back.
"Hi, Mom."
"Hello, Patrice." I didn't rush down the stairs to embrace her. I stayed in my wicker chair. The bridge between us was burned; she had to be the one to lay the first plank to rebuild it.
"Can I come up?" she asked, her voice cracking.
"Of course."
She walked up and sat in the chair Ruth had vacated. She stared at her hands for a long time. The silence stretched, but it wasn't the agonizing silence of waiting for a cancellation. It was the silence of a dam preparing to burst.
"Daniel called me," Patrice finally said, her voice shaking. "After he and Marcus came here in the spring. He was furious. He told me you had lost your mind, that you threatened them with lawyers. He wanted me to join them in some lawsuit against you."
My heart tightened, but I kept my face neutral. "And what did you say to him?"
A tear finally spilled over her eyelashes, tracking a slow path down her cheek. "I told him he was a monster. And then I hung up on him." She looked up at me, her eyes pleading, desperate. "Mom... I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry."
Once she started, she couldn't stop. The words poured out of her in a rush of grief and shame. She told me how lost she had felt when Thomas died. How her husband had been emotionally distant, and how she had filled the void with superficial things—private schools, expensive renovations, maintaining an image of perfection that was completely hollow.
"I couldn't face your grief, Mom, because I was drowning in my own," she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. "It was easier to just ask for things. It was easier to pretend our relationship was a transaction than to sit with you and feel the fact that Dad was gone. I was so selfish. When you didn't answer my text message... I realized I had lost Dad, and I had thrown you away."
I stood up. My knees popped a little—I was seventy, after all—but I walked over to her chair. I knelt beside her, wrapping my arms around her shaking shoulders. She collapsed against my chest, crying with the deep, racking sobs of the little girl who used to scrape her knees on the driveway.
"I'm here, Patrice," I murmured, stroking her hair. "I'm right here."
We cried together on the porch for a long time. It was the cry I hadn't been able to have on my birthday. It was the release of fourteen months of held breath.
When she finally pulled back, wiping her face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt, I took her hand. "Come inside. There is something I want you to read."
I took her into the living room and retrieved the green fireproof box. I took out Thomas’s letter and handed it to her. I watched her eyes scan his careful, architectural handwriting. I watched her breath hitch as she read the part about herself—the part where her father wrote about loving her most tenderly, about watching her drift, and his enduring hope that she would find her way back.
Patrice clutched the letter to her chest and looked at me, her face completely stripped of pretense. "He knew," she whispered.
"He knew," I agreed. "And he loved you anyway. Just like I do."
May you like
That evening, I didn't set eleven plates. I set two. We ate leftover chicken and salad, and we talked for hours. We didn't talk about money, or houses, or private schools. We talked about Thomas. We talked about the tomato seedlings. We talked about her fears and my loneliness.
For the first time in over a year, I had my daughter back. The drought had finally broken.
