“And that child watches me.
She watches every single thing I do in that house and she reports on it to you with her face.
And I have spent two years trying — trying, Chris — to be pleasant and patient and understanding, and I am about to sign up for forty more years of coming second to a memory and third to a nine-year-old, and I wanted one afternoon. One.
Where I was the only person in the photographs.”
She stopped.
Somewhere behind her the piece ended and there was that particular silence that happens before a processional.
“That’s what I said to her,” Pamela said, more quietly.
“Some version of that.
And I should not have said it to a child and I know that, and I’m sorry, and we can fix that.
But you asked.”
And I stood there and understood two things at once.
The first was that almost everything she had just said was true from where she was standing, and that a better man than me might have found a way to hear it eighteen months earlier, in a kitchen, before it had anywhere else to go.
