Chapter 9 — Deb

My daughter and I had grown careful with each other, which is a sadder thing than fighting.

Deb loved me; I never doubted it.

But I had moved into her city carrying a loneliness the size of a house, and without meaning to I had set it down at her feet, and she had felt the weight of it as a demand she could not meet — Sunday dinners that became obligations, phone calls where she could hear me reaching, a mother who had traded a career for a daughter’s schedule and now hovered at its edges, wanting in.

I didn’t see it clearly until the garden gave me somewhere else to put myself.