- Victor and I don’t speak. Bryce told me he and his father had a long, hard talk in January. Bryce said it was the worst conversation of his life. He said his father cried. He said his father said he’d been jealous of me for twenty years. That I was better at everything than him and he couldn’t stand it. That telling people I’d left was easier than telling them the truth, which was that he’d been the one who couldn’t stay.
- I don’t know if any of that’s true. I don’t need to know anymore.
- Whitney sent me a letter in February. A real letter, in a blue envelope. It was two pages long. It said she was sorry. It said she’d left Victor in January. It said she’d moved into an apartment in Rockton and gone back to work full time as a dental hygienist. It said she was seeing a therapist for the first time in her life. It said she’d never been anybody’s real mom and she was okay with that now.
- At the end, it said: Thank you for raising such a good man. I got to borrow him for a while. I know who he really belongs to.
- I keep it in the drawer of my nightstand. Next to my phone.
- In September, I wired the barn.
- It took me three weekends. Roxy came with me and handed me tools and complained about the spiders. Bryce came the last weekend and helped me run the wire through the rafters. He’d never been on a ladder in his life. He was terrible at it. He was scared of heights. He did it anyway.
- Gordon came every weekend too. He said he was “supervising.” Mostly he sat in a lawn chair at the bottom of the ladder with a thermos of coffee and told me stories about his father.
- I pulled out every inch of the old knob-and-tube wiring. I ran new circuits. New outlets. New boxes. And then I strung the lights. Twelve hundred of them. Warm white. Through every rafter and every beam of that old red barn, from one end to the other, in long swooping lines like stars.
- On the day of the wedding, a Saturday at the end of September, the barn was full. Two hundred people. Hay bales and wildflowers and long wooden tables. A string band. Roxy in a purple dress. Whitney, in the back, alone, in a gray one. Gordon in his navy suit and his bronzed boots, which he’d taken down off the mantel for the first time in twenty years, because he said they deserved to see this.
- I wore a new dress. Dark blue. I bought it at a shop in Madison with Caroline and Judith. It was the nicest dress I’ve ever owned.
- And under it, my Red Wings.
- Caroline made me promise. She said if I showed up in anything else, she’d send me home.
- The ceremony was outside, under an old oak tree, as the sun went down. Bryce cried when Caroline walked down the aisle on Gordon’s arm. I cried when Bryce cried. Judith cried. Everybody cried.
- Then it was time for the reception.
- Everybody walked from the oak tree to the barn in the dusk. The big double doors were closed. Bryce and Caroline stood in front of them, holding hands.
- Gordon handed me something. A little remote. A single black switch.
- “You do it,” he said. “Your wire. Your lights. Your boy.”
- I looked at the switch in my hand.
- Then I looked at my son.
- Bryce was looking at me. Twenty-seven years old. In a black tuxedo. With a white rose in his lapel. With his new wife beside him.
- He nodded.
- I flipped the switch.
- Twelve hundred lights came on at once inside that old red barn. All at once. Every rafter. Every beam. Warm and gold and glowing through the cracks in the old boards and the open hayloft door, spilling out across the dark field like a sky full of stars.
- Two hundred people gasped.
- Then the doors swung open. And everybody cheered.
- Bryce didn’t go inside right away.
- He turned around. He walked back to where I was standing at the edge of the crowd, in my blue dress and my boots, with the little black remote still in my hand.
- “Mom,” he said. “The band’s going to play the first dance in a minute. For me and Caroline.” He swallowed. “But after that. The second song. The mother-son dance.” He looked at me. “Will you?”
- “Of course,” I said.
- “Not with Whitney,” he said. “I want you to know. I asked her. Last week. She said no. She said it was yours. She said it always was.”
- I couldn’t say anything.
- He took my hand.
- The second song was “In My Life.” The Beatles. I don’t know how he knew. I used to sing it to him when he was a baby, in the rocking chair, at two in the morning, when he wouldn’t sleep and I had to be up at five for work.
- We danced in the middle of the barn floor, under twelve hundred lights I’d hung with my own hands. Me in my blue dress and my steel-toed boots. My son in his black tuxedo. Two hundred people watching.
- About halfway through the song, he looked down at my feet.
- “Your boots are going to scuff the dance floor,” he said.
- “Probably,” I said.
- “Good,” he said.
- And then he smiled. My son. The same smile from his graduation picture. The one where his arm was around me.
- “Leave a mark, Mom,” he said. “Leave a mark on everything.”
- I laughed. And then I cried. And then I laughed again.
- And we kept dancing, my son and me, until the song was over, under all those lights.
- THE END
