It happened twelve days after I came home. We were driving back from Target with poster board, shampoo, cat food, and the exact vanilla yogurt she liked because adolescence, I had learned, is easiest survived by honoring small stable preferences. We were stopped at a red light when she said, looking straight ahead through the windshield, “Did Grandma ever want me here?”
The question hit with such force I had to grip the steering wheel harder.
There is no clean answer to a child’s question when the truth itself is contaminated.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that Grandma wanted things to be arranged in whatever way made her feel most in control.”
Lily nodded a little. “That’s not what I asked.”
No. It wasn’t.
I looked at the red light, then at my daughter’s profile, her jaw set too firmly for fourteen.
“I think Grandma liked you best when you were easy,” I said. “And that’s not the same thing as loving someone the way they deserve.”
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “So it wasn’t my fault.”
The light turned green. I drove through the intersection before I answered because if I had answered immediately, my voice would have cracked.