Chapter 13 — The Harvest

We had the harvest supper on the last warm Saturday in October, in the garden, at long tables made of planks on sawhorses, the way they’d done it every year for four decades.

I brought Deb, and her husband, and my two grandchildren, and I watched my daughter walk through the gate into the world I’d built without her, and I watched her see me in it — Mare, greeted from every direction, handing Mai’s grandchildren tomatoes, teasing Sal, introduced by Connie to everyone as “my friend, the one I told you about.” Deb was quiet for a while, taking it in.

Then she came and stood next to me at the table where I was cutting Connie’s impossible zucchini bread, and she put her arm around my waist, which she had not done in a long time, and she said, “Mom.