She is offering a debt, an unspoken bill for all the years and the moving van and the given-up career, and the child feels the bill even when the parent would never dream of presenting it, and the feeling of it poisons the very closeness the parent came for.

Deb had been drowning in my need and hating herself for resenting it, and I had been reading her strain as rejection and hurting over it, and the two of us had been slowly grinding down a good and loving relationship into something dutiful and sad — and none of it, not one moment of it, was anybody’s fault.

It was only what happens when a person loses her own center of gravity and reaches for the nearest body to orbit.

The garden gave me back my own center.