What they built at that table instead was something sturdier and more useful than comfort — the ability, at last, to say a true and difficult thing to one another’s faces and survive it.
One warm afternoon, Ezra drove his parents to a building he’d been quietly finishing on the edge of the city — a new senior residence, modern and full of light, with a white cloth draped over the sign above the entrance.
“I want the two of you to pull the cord,” he said.
They pulled it together, and the cloth fell away from a brass sign that read: Deborah & Wendell’s House.
His mother covered her mouth.
“Why would you put our names on it?”