Chapter 8: What Was Left
Six weeks later, Thomas came for Sunday dinner.
Ruth cooked.
She had been cooking elaborate Sunday dinners since she was twelve years old and considered it both a gift and a competitive sport.
The table was set for five — Ruth, her husband David, Maya, Thomas, and me.
Maya sat between Thomas and me.
She had decided, with the certainty that only seven-year-olds possess, that this arrangement was correct and no further discussion was required.
Halfway through the meal, David — who was a quiet man and chose his moments carefully — raised his glass.
"To family," he said.
"All of it.
However it arrives."
Ruth looked at her plate.
Thomas looked at me.
I looked at Maya, who was already eating again because she had the priorities of a sensible child.
After dinner, Ruth and David cleared the table and Maya disappeared to find her drawing things, and Thomas and I sat in the sitting room with tea and the particular comfortable quiet of people who have run out of need to fill silence.
"I've been thinking," Thomas said.
"About?"
"Edinburgh.
It's a long way." He turned his cup in his hands.
"I've been looking at flats.
Here."
I looked at him.
"I'm not suggesting anything dramatic," he said quickly.
"I'm eighty-one years old, Nora.
I'm not proposing anything.
I just — I've spent fifty years in a city where no one knew what I was missing.
I think I'd like to spend whatever comes next somewhere that someone does."
"That's a very careful way to say something."
"I've had fifty years to practice being careful."
I set my cup down.
"There's a building two streets from mine.
They had a notice in the window last week."
He looked at me steadily.
"It would be convenient," I said.
"For walks."
"Yes," he said.
"It would."
Maya came back in carrying her sketchbook and climbed onto the sofa between us without asking.
She opened to a fresh page and began drawing with complete concentration.
After a few minutes she held it up.
It was the two of us, rendered in the frank and accurate style of a seven-year-old — two tall figures with white hair, standing next to something that was either a tree or a large piece of broccoli.
"That's the oak tree," she said, pointing.
"And that's you.
And that's Thomas.
I'm going to put it on my family tree."
She said it as simply as she said everything, and then she went back to drawing.
Thomas looked at the picture for a long moment.
Then he looked at me.
I thought about my mother's letter in the drawer of my bedside table.
I thought about seventeen envelopes tied with kitchen string.
I thought about a girl of thirty in a black dress who had believed, with complete certainty, that the best part of her life was already over.
She had been wrong.
It had taken eighty years and a seven-year-old's homework assignment to prove it, but she had been wrong.
I reached over and straightened the edge of Maya's sketchbook so she had more room to draw.
"Make sure you spell his name right," I said.
Maya looked up at me with the patient expression of someone who has never once misspelled anything important.
"T-h-o-m-a-s," she said.
"I know, Gran."
Thomas made a sound that was almost a laugh.
Outside, the evening settled over the street.
Inside, the lamp was warm and the tea was still hot and Maya's pencil moved steadily across the page, adding detail to the oak tree, making it more like a tree and less like broccoli, getting it right.
Some things, it turns out, are worth getting right.
Even if it takes a little longer than you planned.
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Fifty years of silence, one child's honesty, and a ring worn on a chain — this story is a reminder that what is truly meant for us has a way of finding us, even when others try to stand in the way.
Have you ever had someone you loved come back into your life after years apart — or do you know someone who has?
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