He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “She wants to apologize.”
“She’s welcome to.”
“Are you going to let her?”
I looked at my son across the table.
I thought about what an apology really means. When someone is sorry they treated you badly. Versus when someone is sorry they missed their chance.
Are those the same thing? Or do they just wear the same face?
I thought about how I was sixty-three years old, and I had spent most of the last ten years making myself smaller. Quieter. Easier to manage. Less likely to cause anyone any discomfort. I’d sat by the kitchen door. I’d said “that’s fine” when it wasn’t. I’d laughed at jokes about women my age needing financial advisers.
And none of it, not one bit of it, had made anybody love me more.
“I’ll hear what she has to say,” I told him. “What happens after that depends on what she says.”
Todd nodded slowly.
Then he asked, very quietly, “What are you going to do with it? All of it?”
I’d been thinking about that for a long time. Since long before the acquisition.
“What I was already planning to do,” I said.
He looked confused.
“I have an appointment next week with an estate attorney,” I said. “I’ve been talking with the Millbrook County Rural Education Fund since last summer. They give scholarships to kids from farm towns who want to go to college or trade school. And there’s a regional food bank consortium that’s been working out of a warehouse that’s about forty years past due for a renovation. The roof leaks onto the canned goods. I’ve been talking with their director, a man named Gerald, for about six months.”
Todd blinked at me.
“You’ve been planning this? Already?”
“Since summer.”
“You didn’t tell anyone.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s business yet.”
He looked at me for a long, long moment. I could see him recalculating something behind his eyes.
Not the money. Todd has never understood money the way I do, and he probably never will. He’s an engineer. He likes things he can hold in his hands.
It was something about me. About who I was. Something he’d either forgotten, or had never really paid attention to in the first place.
“I feel like I don’t know you very well,” he said.
He didn’t say it like an accusation. He said it almost sadly.
“That’s been more your choice than mine, honey,” I said. “But it doesn’t have to stay that way.”
He looked down at the bakery box.
“Do you still like the cinnamon streusel?”
“I do,” I said.
He untied the red string. I got two plates.
We each had a piece. We didn’t talk much.
But it was something.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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