Chapter 46 #2
Maggie closes her eyes for a long second.
“We all made mistakes, but the money was the least of it. After Ginny took you back east, we never saw you again. From then on, our relationship with her was never the same, and our relationship with you didn’t exist. We all loved you, and we all wanted a hand in raising you, making sure you knew the love your parents were so good at giving.
Instead, you were ripped away from us.” Her face twists in frustration.
“Ginny simply couldn’t hear that you might need something more than she could give. ”
Both women look at me like it’s my turn to speak. “I…so that was it? She took me back home and…?”
“She was your legal guardian, so we had no recourse in the eyes of the law. And the harder we fought, the more she withdrew. First it was simply her insistence she could raise you alone, but then it was no more holiday visits, no more family reunions, not even phone calls. Maybe we shouldn’t have fought at all, should have taken a softer approach, but it felt so dire.
To have a little girl taken away from the family who loved her and taken back to a place that bore no resemblance to the home she’d once known felt absolutely dire.
A gentle hand didn’t feel possible. I’ve wished a thousand times we could do it over and do it right, but in truth, I don’t know how we could have done it differently. ”
She stares somewhere beyond me, then suddenly shakes her head, unsatisfied.
“That’s not true. Harmony said we might look you up on the internet, get a message to you.
” She rests her head on her hand, looking childlike and faraway.
“I said no. I was afraid of Ginny shutting down communication for good. I should have taken the chance.”
Maggie takes a deep breath and shakes her head.
“Look at me getting riled up, it’s like I’m back there all over again.
What I want you to know is that it wasn’t pride that caused your grandmother to act that way, it was love.
She loved you so fiercely and was so determined to be everything you needed that I think our love for you—wanting to be everything you needed too—felt like a threat.
She simply didn’t know how to cope with her grief well enough to show you all that love. ”
“How did you know…” I can’t find the words.
“That she didn’t show you enough love? The one thing she did allow was letters between the three of us sisters.
I think she preferred it over phone calls because it meant she could say what she wanted to say without having to listen.
It’s hard to argue through letters.” Maggie turns to the table and slides what I thought was a centerpiece toward me, a box covered in pink-and-blue floral fabric.
“They’re all here, if you’d like to read them.
She wanted to be better for you, and she believed she could be once she broke through her grief.
I suppose only you can say whether she ever did. ”
But her eyes tell me she knows my grandmother never did. The evidence is right here: the family who wanted to love me practically strangers and the story of my own upbringing news to me.
“You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to,” Harmony says to me, though she’s eyeing her mother like she expects to be disagreed with.
Maggie folds her hands in her lap. “I suppose. But you deserve to know. No sense going through life believing lies about yourself.” She looks at the box. “I can forgive Ginny for a lot, but not for letting you grow up alone.”
I cut my eyes away. This woman I barely know sees right through me. She might have been a fly on the wall of my grandmother’s house with the way she understands the quiet distance that marked my childhood.
“How about a little snack break?” Harmony asks. Without waiting for a response, she gets up and retrieves a pink bakery box from the counter, then sets it on the table. “You can take the letters home and read them if you’d like. Danish?”
Maggie plucks a pastry from the box. “Certainly. Or read them right here if you’d like. You might have questions.” Her eyes flicker at me before she turns her attention to her snack.
So I do.
Morning stretches into a sunny afternoon as I read through the handwritten letters from my grandmother.
Left alone in a rocking chair on the wraparound porch when Maggie goes inside to help Harmony prepare lunch, I start to feel less like a visitor to a stranger’s home and more like someone who belongs here, someone who went away for a long time but always knew she’d be back.
It’s nearly dinnertime when I pull out of the gravel driveway with the fabric-covered box on my passenger seat.
In my rearview mirror, I see Harmony turn for the front door, but Maggie, in her pink housedress and a gray cardigan, is still waving her frail arm at me from the porch.
An ordinary scene for many families, but I have to laugh at myself for feeling like I’m in a feel-good movie because I’ve never lived through a scene like this.
The only reason it doesn’t make me want to cry is because I’ll see Maggie in three days—she wants to come and give her childhood home a proper goodbye—and because bewilderment more than anything else is the prevailing emotion of the day.
Maggie’s story answered so many questions I never allowed myself to ask, but what to make of it all?
I’ve lied to myself for so long I stopped recognizing it, but Maggie’s frank way of laying it out there—that I didn’t get the love I deserved—has unearthed the truth. I was loved so much it couldn’t get through. I wasn’t meant to be alone.
At the end of the driveway, I stop to check the directions on my phone right as a text appears on the screen.
SUSANNA: Big day over here! The people who toured the house this morning want the place, and they want it soon. Cute young couple, you’d like them. Give me a call this evening if convenient and I’ll fill you in.
The rush of relief I expected is overshadowed by longing. Just like that, one piece of my history finds me and another one is taken away.