Chapter 43: After Dinner
After dinner, the family lingered the way families do when nobody wants the day to end. Eleanor told stories about the street — about the Hendersons' dog, about the new people three doors down, about the time Margaret's azaleas won the neighborhood garden prize and Margaret had pretended not to care for exactly one day. Josh and Tina went for a walk around the block to "walk off the pie," which fooled no one, since they took the long way and came back with red cheeks and cold hands. Margaret dozed in her chair by the fire for twenty minutes, woke up, denied she had been sleeping, and asked for tea.
And Mark and I washed the dishes.
It happened without discussion. The table was cleared, the leftovers were put away — Margaret supervising the wrapping of every container with the intensity of a woman who does not believe in wasting food — and then Mark rolled up his sleeves and picked up a dish towel, and I started running the hot water, and we fell into the rhythm of it without a word. He dried. I washed. The kitchen filled with steam and the clink of the good silverware.
We worked in silence for a while. Then Mark said, very quietly, not looking at me, "I'm sorry."
I kept washing. "For what, specifically?"
He was quiet for a long moment. The water ran. "Not for everything," he said at last. "Because I don't know how to be sorry for everything. It's too big. I don't — I can't hold all of it at once." He dried a plate with excessive care. "But I'm sorry for the floors."
I stopped washing and looked at him. "The floors."
"Your first night home. Mom on her hands and knees in the kitchen while we watched TV." His voice was low and rough. "I tell myself I didn't see it. That I was tired, that Tina and I had our own problems, that Mom insisted she wanted to help. But I saw it, Diane. I saw it every time. And I let it happen in my own mother's house — in her house — because it was easier than admitting what I'd done to get the house in the first place."
The water was getting cold. I turned it off.
"I don't know how to be sorry for all of it," he said again. "But I can be sorry for the floors. That's a thing I can hold."
I stood there with my hands in the cooling dishwater, looking at my brother — forty-two years old, a car salesman with steadier work now, a father, a husband, the boy I had grown up with and the man who had taken our mother's house — and I thought about everything the mediator had said, and everything Ellen Cho had said, and everything I had told myself about justice and accountability and doing things properly.
And then I thought about the floors. My mother, seventy-one, on her hands and knees, scrubbing. And my brother, seeing it, and doing nothing. That was the image I had carried for fourteen months. That was the image that had made me hire the lawyer and refuse the payoff and sit outside my mother's locked bedroom door until I heard her breathing evenly.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"I accept it the way you offered it," I said. "Partially. And honestly." I picked up another plate and started washing again. "It's a start, Mark. It's not the whole thing. But it's a start."
He nodded, and his eyes were wet, and he went back to drying, and we finished the dishes side by side without saying anything else. It wasn't forgiveness — not the whole, clean kind. It was something smaller and more honest: two siblings, in their mother's kitchen, doing the dishes, with one true thing said out loud between them.
When we finished, Mark hung up the dish towel, and he said, "Thanks for not making it crueler than it had to be." And I knew he was quoting Tina — she had said those exact words to me on moving day — and I knew he meant it in his own way. He had heard his wife say it, and he had held onto it, and now he was giving it back to me.
"Go sit with your son," I told him. "He gave a good toast."
Mark nodded, and went into the living room, and sat down next to Josh on the couch, and I watched from the kitchen doorway as Josh leaned, just slightly, against his father's shoulder. Fourteen months ago, that boy had walked out of a room rather than watch his father claim his grandmother's house. Tonight he leaned on him. People change slowly, and then all at once.