Chapter 8: What the Letter Said
My mother called me four days after the meeting in Patricia's office.
I let it ring the first time.
The second time, I picked up.
"I'd like to see you," she said.
"Not to argue.
I just — I want to see you."
She came to my flat on a Wednesday evening.
I made tea she didn't ask for and set it in front of her anyway.
She looked smaller somehow.
Not physically.
Something in the way she held herself.
She had the cream envelope in her bag.
She took it out and set it on the kitchen table between us.
"She knew me very well," my mother said.
"Your grandmother."
I waited.
"She wrote about your father," she said.
"About the years after he died.
About choices I made that she — that she disagreed with." She pressed her thumb along the edge of the envelope.
"She wrote about you.
About how proud she was of you.
About the gown." A pause.
"She wrote that she had watched me spend twenty years trying to make Sienna into the daughter I wanted and overlooking the one I already had."
I didn't move.
"She wasn't wrong," my mother said.
It came out plainly, the way very difficult things sometimes do when a person has been carrying them long enough.
"I always found Sienna easier.
She wanted the things I understood — the right name, the right house, the right kind of life.
And you—" She stopped.
"You were always more like Nora.
Stubborn.
Particular.
You cared about the things you cared about so deeply it frightened me.
I didn't know what to do with that."
"So you gave my wedding to her," I said.
"I thought I was helping her," she said.
"I told myself that.
I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like what it was."
"Yes," she said.
Outside, it had started to rain.
The window was streaked with it.
"Did you know about Diane?" I asked.
"The woman in Manchester."
My mother looked at me.
"What woman?"
Her surprise was real.
I could tell.
Which meant there had been at least one thing she hadn't arranged, hadn't known, hadn't managed.
"Graham had another woman," I said.
"For two years.
Before Sienna.
During me.
After both of us."
My mother sat very still.
"Sienna found out," I said.
"She ended it."
The expression on my mother's face went through several things in quick succession.
Anger.
Something that might have been embarrassment.
And then, beneath both of those, something that looked almost like relief — the involuntary kind, the kind you feel when a thing you were defending turns out not to deserve it.
"She's all right?" my mother asked.
"Sienna."
"She'll be fine," I said.
"She's tougher than you give her credit for."
My mother wrapped both hands around her tea.
"I owe you more than an apology," she said.
"I know that.
I don't expect you to — I'm not asking for anything tonight.
I just needed you to know that I read the letter.
That I understand what I did." A long pause.
"And that your grandmother was right about most of it."
I looked at her across the kitchen table.
She was sixty-three years old and she had her mother's eyes and she had spent a very long time making decisions that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with fear, and she was sitting in my kitchen on a Wednesday evening in the rain with a letter in her hands that had finally said what years of living together had never quite managed.
I didn't forgive her yet.
But I poured her more tea.
And she stayed another hour, and we talked about my father, and about Nora, and about small things that had nothing to do with any of it.
And when she left, she touched my arm at the door, very briefly.
"The gown," she said.
"Wear it, Juliet.
Please."
I didn't answer.
But after she left I went to the bedroom and opened the wardrobe where the dress had been returned, hanging in its cloth bag, unaltered, untouched.
May you like
I didn't take it out.
I just rested my hand on the outside of the bag, where I knew the lily-of-the-valley were, each one stitched by two sets of hands that loved me.
