But this time, Jason did not apologize.

He let the silence go on, because he simply did not have the money, and no amount of his mother’s displeasure could conjure it.

He was learning, at forty years old, the single lesson that his mother and his sister and his marriage had all conspired to spare him: what things truly cost, when there is no one else standing behind you, quietly paying.

I took no pleasure in his hardship.

But I will admit that I took something, watching him say no to his mother and mean it — a kind of sad, distant satisfaction that the man who fathered my children might, too late for our marriage though perhaps not too late for his own life, be growing up at last.

Chapter 19 — The Cancun Potato