Page 87 of Take Two

She doesn’t speak. She just looks at us. Really looks, the way she perhaps hasn’t in years, her eyes moving from Julian’s face to mine and back again, wide and still, tears already brimming and gathering with every pass between us.

For a long moment, nobody moves.

Then her shoulders sag, almost imperceptibly at first and then completely, the way a person looks when they’ve been holding something far too heavy for far too long and have finally allowed themselves to set it down.

She opens her arms. “My babies. . .” The words break apart before she gets another one out. Tears fall freely down her face, unchecked, and it is Julian who steps forward first. I follow without thought, without deliberation, the little boy still somewhere inside me wanting nothing more than to put himself between his momma and whatever is making her cry.

She barely reaches our shoulders anymore, this woman who once seemed tall enough to fill an entire room, but somehow she still manages to gather us both against her, holding on with a strength that surprises me and doesn’t.

The first sob leaves her before it leaves either of us.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, the words pressed into the fabric of our shirts, muffled and broken and unmistakable. “Please, forgive me. I’m so. . .so sorry, boys.”

I close my eyes and let the apology move through me. I had convinced myself for years, with considerable effort and partial success, that I had made my peace with the distance, that I was too into my own life and too careful about my own healing to let the old grief back in. Standing here now with her arms around me and her voice cracking against my chest, I understand clearly that telling yourself you’re too angry to miss someone and actually not missing them are two entirely different things.

I missed her. We both did. Despite everything, despite all of it, God, I missed my mother in a way I never once fully let myself say out loud.

The rest of the afternoon unfolds slowly and warmly and a little cautiously, the way things do when people who love each other are also navigating around years of hurt. We sit around the dining room table, the same table I did homework at and argued at and sat at in silence at, and somehow it still manages to feel like something that belongs to us. Dad carves the meat with the same focused ceremony he has always brought to it, and Momma moves between the kitchen and the table insisting we take more food before we’ve made any real progress on what’s already in front of us, which is as unchanged as the roses outside.

Julian and I fall back into the old rhythm without meaning to, passing dishes across each other and talking over one another and occasionally catching ourselves, and every so often I look up to find one of my parents simply watching us, quietly, as though they still can’t quite believe we came.

Nothing is magically repaired over a Sunday dinner. We are not the kind of family that ties things up cleanly. There are pauses where none of us quite know what to say, and there are moments when the history sits heavily over the food and the candles and the good China. But Ma doesn’t hide behind scripture or revisionism. She tells us, simply and without decoration, that she spent too long letting fear and inherited belief build a wall between herself and her sons. That she loves us more than anything she has been taught or told or led to believe. That whether we choose a man or a woman, all she wants now, all she is asking for, is the chance to be present in our lives and see us happy.

It isn’t sufficient to undo the past or dissolve the hurt that accumulated over years of absence, but it is enough. Enough to begin the kind of healing a family needs when it has been cracked open and left in the weather for too long.

She asks after Malik first, leaning forward and listening closely while Julian describes their life together in the kind of particular, fond detail that makes it clear they are genuinely, deeply in love and enamored with one another. The upcoming joint album. Their apartment in Germany. The place that changed everything for the both of them. Momma listens to all of it with careful attention, her hands folded in her lap, and when the subject eventually turns to me she approaches it with the same deliberateness.

“Your father tells me Jamie plays hockey,” she says, keeping her hands occupied by straightening her fork and spoon against the tablecloth.

“He does. He’s with the Vipers.”

A small, genuine smile moves across her mouth. “I would like to meet him.”

The answer comes without effort, without the hesitation I might have braced for. “I think he’d like to meet you too. His parents are in Seattle, so there’ll be plenty of chances to get everyone in the same room.”

Dad looks up from his plate immediately, sharp and pleased in the way he gets when he’s already understood the thing no one has technically said yet.

“I’m moving to Seattle,” I say. May as well put it on the table alongside everything else.

For a beat, the room goes quiet.

Then Dad lets out a cheer loud enough that Momma’s hand flies to her pearls, his fork points at me like he’s crowning me with it, his face broken open into pure delight. “You tell Jamie I expect a seat behind the glass, son. Behind the glass.”

Laughter breaks around the table, immediate and warm and genuine, and it moves through me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

“I’m sure he has one with your name on it,” I manage, laughing through it and surprised to find that my eyes are stinging with something. I don’t know why I braced for resistance. Old wounds do that, make you carry armor into rooms that no longer require it. All I can feel in this moment, sitting at this table, is happiness. The specific, unexpected happiness of your parents being simply, uncomplicatedly proud of you.

“That’s my boy,” Dad says, already returning to his dinner, clapping the table once for emphasis.

The words feel differently than they would have once. There’s no weight hidden inside them, no expectation waiting underneath, no performance required to earn them. He is happy for me. Already constructing the version of himself who sits behind the glass at Climate Pledge Arena, yelling at officials and conducting himself as though the Vipers organization personally recruited him.

By the time the dishes are cleared and the evening has begun to cool, the light outside has shifted to that deep, slanted gold that southern California does at the end of a long day. Momma hugs us both again at the door, holding on longer this time, her arms tighter than before, as though the first embrace was practice for the real thing. Dad wraps us each in one of his broad, back-slapping hugs, and then holds me by the shoulders for a moment before he lets go, and reminds me, with complete seriousness, that he expects a call about those tickets.

Julian walks with me out to the driveway, and we stand between our vehicles for a moment beneath the California sky, which has gone deep blue and streaked with the last of the pink at its edges.

“You good?” he asks again, and this time he’s smiling when he says it.

I look back at the house. Through the open front doorway, Momma and Dad are still standing side by side, watching us go, my mother’s hand resting in the crook of my father’s arm.