PART 3
I opened my phone again.
His photograph was still there.
Everyone smiling.
Everyone eating.
Everyone together.
And beneath it:
Wish you were here.
I typed three different responses.
I wish you were here too.
Deleted.
My mom almost died tonight.
Deleted.
How could you do this?
Deleted.
Finally, I wrote nothing.
I turned the phone off.
That was the first time I stopped explaining my pain to Grant.
I didn’t know it then, but it was also the beginning of the end of the woman I had become for him.
My mother survived Christmas.
Barely.
Her blood pressure stabilized around three in the morning, but the doctors discovered another complication that required additional treatment.
Then four.
Then six.
January came.
Then February.
Then March.
Ninety days.
Ninety days of hospital corridors, plastic chairs, vending-machine coffee, medical charts, and whispered conversations outside operating rooms.
Ninety days of watching my mother fight for every ordinary thing most people took for granted.
The first time she managed to stand without assistance, she cried.
I cried with her.
The first time she ate half a bowl of soup, I took a photograph.
The first time she walked ten steps down the hallway, I clapped like she had won a marathon.
Grant was never there.
Not once.
He occasionally asked questions.
“How is she?”
“Did the doctor say anything?”
“Is she getting better?”
But he never came to see her.
Not even once.
I eventually stopped asking.
Our marriage changed quietly.
There was no dramatic explosion.
No screaming match.
No broken dishes.
Instead, something inside me simply became still.
I stopped waiting for him to become the husband I needed.
I stopped checking the hospital entrance whenever the elevator doors opened.
I stopped telling my mother that Grant was coming.
And I stopped making excuses for him.
My mother noticed.
She always noticed.
One afternoon, after physical therapy, she looked at me and said, “Rachel.”
“Yes?”
“Are you happy?”
The question caught me off guard.
I laughed nervously.
“Mom, you’re in the hospital. Why are you asking me that?”
“Because you’re avoiding the answer.”
I looked down at my hands.
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
I said nothing.
She reached for my hand.
“Don’t stay somewhere just because you remember how it felt when it was good.”
My throat tightened.
“Mom…”
“I know you love him.”
I stared at her.
“But love isn’t supposed to require you to disappear.”
Those words followed me for months.
My mother finally came home in late March.
She was weak.
She needed help bathing.
She couldn’t climb stairs alone.
She needed medication at specific times.
So I moved into her house temporarily.
Grant complained.
“You’ve been gone for three months.”
“I know that.”
“Then why are you saying it like I went on vacation?”
He rubbed his forehead.
“Rachel, I’m your husband.”
“And she’s my mother.”
“So where does that leave me?”
I looked at him.
“I don’t know anymore.”
