Garrett texted on the 28th: She’s not going to come around easily. You know how she is. Maybe give it some time?
I read it twice.
Then I turned my phone face-down on the counter.
I wasn’t angry at Garrett. He’d spent forty years smoothing things over with my mother the way my father had, the way I had — until I ran out of reasons to. He wasn’t wrong that she wouldn’t come around easily. But that was a description of the problem, not an argument for patience.
Oliver was checking faces mid-sentence.
We were past patience.
Part 4
On the 29th, Oliver asked if he talked too much.
We were building a puzzle on the living room floor — a thousand-piece map of the solar system that Jess had bought him for Christmas. He was good at puzzles. Systematic. Patient in a way that surprised people who assumed loud kids were scattered.
He found an edge piece, fit it in, and without looking up said: “Dad. Do I talk too much?”
I set down the piece in my hand.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
He shrugged one shoulder. Still looking at the puzzle.
“Grandma said.”
“I know she did. And she was wrong.”
“But she was a teacher. She knows about kids.”
I thought carefully. Not because I didn’t know what I believed, but because he was eight, and the wrong words land in eight-year-olds and stay there.
“Buddy. You remember when you told me about how plants grow toward light? You taught me that in October. The tropism thing.”
He looked up. “Phototropism.”
“Right. You told me that, and I didn’t know it, and I thought about it for three days. That’s what happens when you talk. You put things in people’s heads they didn’t have before.” I paused. “Is that too much?”
He considered it. The way he always did — genuinely, taking his time.
“No,” he said.
“Grandma made a mistake,” I said. “People who love us make mistakes sometimes. That one was a bad one. But it doesn’t make her right.”