to be married.
“I told her you wouldn’t let her do those things,” Anna said. “She asked how I thought you would stop her once you were gone.”
“My mother wouldn’t…”
The sentence died halfway out.
Ruth had taught Sunday school for forty years. She organized meals for sick neighbors. At her funeral, people had lined up to tell me how generous she was.
But I remembered other things, too. People lowering their voices when she entered a room. Her certainty that she knew what was best. The way disagreement could become disloyalty in her hands.
“Everyone listened to her,” Anna said. “I was twenty, Walter. My family couldn’t afford for her to be angry with us.”
I looked at the untouched coffee.
“So you wrote the letter.”
She nodded. “And you left.”
“Because you asked me to.”
“I know.”
We sat with that for a while.
Finally, I asked
