Chapter 8: A Visit
She asked for a visit in writing, which I counted as progress.
We scheduled forty-five minutes on a Saturday afternoon. Daniel stayed in the room. The rules stayed in force. My mother arrived with a gift bag from a neutral store—clothes in yellow and green, no embroidery. I watched her hands as she offered it. They shook once. She did not comment on the nursery colors she had once replaced without asking. She held Samuel for ten minutes while he stared at her earrings, and she did not call him by any name except “little one,” as if even that cost her.
Near the end she said, “I think about him.”
Daniel’s eyes met mine. Him could have meant Samuel. It did not.
“I know,” I said. “Thinking about him does not entitle you to redesign this one.”
She nodded, a small bitter motion, and returned Samuel to my arms when he fussed. At the door she paused, looked at the frame on the shelf with the baptismal date, and left without a speech. After the door closed, Daniel exhaled like a man who had been bracing a wall with his shoulder.
“That was survivable,” he said.
May you like
“Survivable is the standard for now,” I answered.
We did not reward the visit with expanded access. We logged it as one clean hour and kept the next invitation unoffered until time proved the hour was not a tactic.
