“A real one.”
“Every day.”
“Does learning all this change how you remember her?”
He thought for a long time.
“Yes.”
My chest tightened.
“How?”
“She’s bigger now.”
I looked at him.
He rubbed dirt from his palm.
“For years after she died, I remembered the version of her I knew at the end. Your mother making lists. Your mother complaining about my boots. Your mother falling asleep during television.”
He smiled.
“I forgot she was twenty once.”
The garden murmured around us.
“She was scared,” he continued. “She made choices. She regretted things. She kept secrets. She helped people. She hurt people without wanting to. She spent the rest of her life trying to make something useful out of what hurt.”
He looked at the markers.
“That’s bigger than the woman who fell asleep watching television.”
I took his hand.
He tolerated this for perhaps thirty seconds.
