My mother was silent. She saw no other option. As an afterthought they removed their aprons in the garage and piled them on the roof of the Mustang. My mother bent down and lifted the garage door.
It was still early enough so the light would hold for the beginning of their walk. “We could take Holiday,” my mother tried.
“Just you and your mother,” my grandmother said. “The most frightening pairing imaginable.”
They had never been close. They both knew it, but it wasn’t something they acknowledged very much. They joked around it like two children who didn’t particularly like each other but were the only children in a large, barren neighborhood. Now, never having tried to before, having always let her daughter run as fast as she could in whatever direction she wished, my grandmother found that she was suddenly catching up.
They had passed by the O’Dwyers’ and were near the Tarkings’ before my grandmother said what she had to say.
“My humor buried my acceptance,” my grandmother said. “Your father had a long-term affair in New Hampshire. Her first initial was F and I never knew what it stood for. I found a thousand options for it over the years.”
“Mother?”
My grandmother kept walking, didn’t turn. She found that the crisp fall air helped, filling her lungs until they felt cleaner than they had just minutes before.
“Did you know that?”
“No.”
“I guess I never told you,” she said. “I didn’t think you needed to know. Now you do, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this.”
They had come to the bend in the road that would lead them back around the circle. If they went that way and did not stop, eventually they would find themselves in front of Mr. Harvey’s house. My mother froze.
“My poor, poor sweetie,” my grandmother said. “Give me your hand.”
They were awkward. My mother could count on her fingers how many times her tall father had leaned down and kissed her as a child. The scratchy beard that smelled of a cologne that, after years of searching, she could never identify. My grandmother took her hand and held on as they walked the other way.
They walked into an area of the neighborhood where newer families seemed to be moving in more and more. The anchor houses, I remembered my mother calling them, because they lined the street that led into the whole development – anchored the neighborhood to an original road built before the township was a township. The road that led to Valley Forge, to George Washington and the Revolution.
“Susie’s death brought your father’s back to me,” my grandmother said. “I never let myself mourn him properly.”
“I know,” my mother said.
“Do you resent me for it?”
My mother paused. “Yes.”
My grandmother patted the back of my mother’s hand with her free one. “Good, see, that’s a nugget.”
“A nugget?”
“Something that’s coming out of all this. You and me. A nugget of truth between us.”
They passed the one-acre lots on which trees had been growing for twenty years. If not exactly towering, they were still twice as tall as the fathers who had first held them and stomped the dirt around them with their weekend work shoes.
“Do you know how alone I’ve always felt?” my mother asked her mother.
“That’s why we’re walking, Abigail,” Grandma Lynn said.
My mother focused her eyes in front of her but stayed connected to her mother with her hand. She thought of the solitary nature of her childhood. How, when she had watched her two daughters tie string between paper cups and go to separate rooms to whisper secrets to each other, she could not really say she knew how that felt. There had been no one else in the house with her but her mother and father, and then her father had gone.
She stared at the tops of the trees, which, miles from our development, were the tallest things around. They stood on a high hill that had never been cleared for houses and on which a few old farmers still dwelled.
“I can’t describe what I’m feeling,” she said. “To anyone.”
They reached the end of the development just as the sun was going down over the hill in front of them. A moment passed without either of them turning around. My mother watched the last light flicker in a drain-off puddle at the end of the road.
