Chapter 13: Pie

I opened the bathroom door, and my mother stood on the landing holding a pie.

She wore her cardigan, her reading glasses on their chain, and the pink house slippers Harvey had given her last Christmas.

She looked at my hair.

She looked at Flora's hair, which had half fallen out of its pins.

She looked at the lipstick on my collarbone that I had missed.

"I brought two forks," my mother said.

I could not make a sound.

Flora, beside me, said in a perfectly polite voice, "Thank you, Joan."

My mother came into the little bathroom and set the pie on the closed toilet lid.

She turned around and shut the door behind her.

"Sit," she said. "Both of you. On the edge of the tub."

We sat.

I was thirty-one years old, and I sat on the tub where she used to bathe me.

I waited for the end of my life.

"I put you in the room with the double bed on purpose," Mom said.

"Mom."

"Let me finish, Robin."

She took off her glasses and let them hang.

"I knew at the wedding. I watched you give that toast, and I watched Flora watch you."

"Harvey saw it too. He said, 'Joan, leave them alone, they'll sort it out.' So we left you alone."

"Two years is a long time to leave you alone."

Flora made a small choked noise that might have been a laugh.

"You knew," I said.

"I did," Mom said.

She turned to Flora.

Her voice shook a little, and I had never heard it shake.

"Flora, honey, the idea was mine, not Robin's. I have been ashamed of it for two years."

Flora reached across me and took my mother's hand.

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