“You want to tell me what that was?” she asks.
“Fight got out of hand.”
“I can see that.” A pause. “What was it about?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Mom is quiet for a moment, and through the kitchen window, I can see Cash outside, pretending to check something on the fence. Giving us space while still being Cash.
“Aria called this morning,” Mom says.
My hand tightens around the ice pack.
“She mentioned you were over there last night…late. She didn’t say much; she didn’t have to.”
The kitchen is very quiet. The refrigerator hums. The clock on the wall ticks. I’ve sat in this kitchen my whole life and have never once felt the walls of it the way I feel them right now. It’s like my entire world is caving in on me.
“Mom…”
“I’m not here to corner you,” she says simply. “I’m not here to push you somewhere you’re not ready to go. I just want to sit here with my son for a minute and tell him something I should have said a long time ago.”
I look up from the ice pack.
“I’ve been watching you your whole life, Rhett. Watching you figure out what this family needed and then becoming it. Watching you carry things that were never yours to carry because you thought that’s what being a good son looked like.” She pauses. “I want you to know that I never asked you to do that. Neither did your father.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, where it’s holding the ice pack. “You don’t have to tell me anything I don’t already know, baby.”
The kitchen goes quiet again, and I look at her—at the woman who has been watching me perform my whole life and never once said a word about what she saw underneath it.
“How long?” I ask, my voice coming out low.
“Long enough that I stopped worrying and just started waiting for you to be ready.” A pause. “I know I pushed Molly on you. I just thought that, maybe, if I—” She stops and shakes her head. “That wasn’t fair to either of you.”
My throat tightens so much that I can’t speak.
“Look, you don’t have to be ready today,” she says. “You don’t have to say a single word you’re not ready to say. I just need you to hear me when I tell you that there’s nothing you could be that would change what you are to me. Do you understand that?”
I stare at the ice pack in my hands.
“Rhett.”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
She squeezes my hand once and lets go.
The silence stretches on.
“Rhett.” Her voice is gentle—the same tone she would use when I was six years old and scared of something and she was telling me it was okay to be scared. “You don’t have to perform for me. Not in this kitchen. Not with me.”
I press the ice pack harder against my eye because I’m not going to cry in this kitchen. I am absolutely not going to cry in this kitchen.
“I thought—” I stop. “I thought if anyone knew, they’d want something different from me.”
“I know you did.” She says it gently. No judgment in her tone. “That’s the part that broke my heart a little—that you thought any version of you would be less than.” She holds my eyes. “You are my son—every part of you. That has never had a single condition on it and never will.”
I don’t cry. I come close, though, as I sit at this kitchen table with my busted eye and my mother’s words settling into me like water into dry ground. But I breathe through it and I don’t cry.
She stands and puts her hand on my shoulder for a moment, then moves to the sink and looks out the window.
