But she got this: a kitchen table in her son’s house, with crayons on it and a lunch box and a half-finished spelling worksheet with Mason’s name at the top. She got the cold Sprite bottle on the counter and the look on her son’s face when he held it. She got her grandson appearing in the kitchen doorway at some point late in the evening, still awake because children always know when something important is happening, holding a plastic dinosaur in one hand and a sheet of stickers in the other.
He looked at her with the direct, uncomplicated assessment of a young child evaluating an unfamiliar adult.
Then he walked over and pressed a dinosaur sticker into her palm.
“Do you like green?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good,” he said, and went back down the hallway.
She held the sticker in her palm and looked at Daniel, who was watching his son disappear around the corner with an expression she recognized from somewhere deep in her own history — the expression of a parent who cannot quite believe the person they made.
“I don’t know how to be your son,” he said.
“You already are,” she said.
They stood in the kitchen in the quiet that follows the kind of day that rearranges everything, and she understood that the work of becoming — of building a relationship from the material of who they each were now, rather than who they had been to each other when he was seven and she was thirty — was going to take a long time and was going to require things from both of them that neither of them could fully anticipate.
She was fifty years old. Her life had been divided into Before Daniel and After Daniel for twenty years.
She thought, standing in that kitchen with the Sprite bottle on the counter and a dinosaur sticker in her palm, that maybe there was a third section now.
After Route 9.
She would give it time to show her what it meant.
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