Lying there, I did a strange thing: I tried to remember the last time someone in that family had asked how I was and waited for the real answer.
I couldn’t.
Not one instance in five years.
They asked me for things — where’s the remote, did you call the pharmacy, is dinner ready, can you drive Mom — an endless stream of small requests that I had mistaken, all this time, for the ordinary texture of belonging to people.
But a request is not the same as care.
You can be spoken to a hundred times a day and still be completely alone, if every sentence aimed at you is a demand and none of them is a question about you.
I had been the most necessary person in that house and the least known, and I had confused the necessity for love for so long that I’d built my whole sense of worth on top of it.
It took a hospital ceiling and a stranger’s kindness to show me the difference.
Chapter 2 — A Pot of Beef Stew
The whole disaster had started, as these things do, over something almost too small to name.