The kitchen was quiet. Five people standing in the room where they had once been a family looking at the wreckage of what they had become without the woman who held them together. Raymond sat down heavily in the chair at the head of the table. The chair Eileen used to sit in. He put his hands flat on the surface and looked at his children.
“Your mother was right about me,” he said. “I built this farm and I thought that was enough. I thought providing for you was the same as loving you. It wasn’t. She spent forty-seven years trying to teach me the difference and I didn’t hear her until I read it in her journal after she was already gone.”
Kevin wiped his face with the back of his hand. Diane pressed her fingers to her eyes. Marcus had not moved, but his jaw was working. The muscles tight, holding back something he was not ready to release.
“I’m sorry,” Raymond said. “For the test, for the lies, for the years before the test when I let your mother do all the loving while I did the work. I’m sorry for the games you missed, Kevin. For the calls I didn’t make, Diane. For never telling you I was proud of you, Marcus. I was. I am. I just didn’t know how to say it without your mother translating.”
Nora walked across the kitchen. She pulled out the chair beside Raymond and sat down. She put her hand on his arm. She didn’t say it was okay because it wasn’t entirely okay, but her hand on his arm said she was still there.
Kevin moved next. He crossed the kitchen in three strides and sat down at the table pulling his chair close. He put his elbows on the surface and covered his face. His shoulders shook once, then steadied. Diane sat down slowly pulling her chair in placing her hands on the table beside the financial documents she had never cared enough to ask about.
Marcus was last. He stood against the counter for another full minute alone in his anger weighing it. Then he pulled out a chair. He sat down at the table with his family. Nobody spoke for a while. The five of them sat in Eileen’s kitchen in the chairs they had sat in as children and the silence was different now. It was not the silence of absence. It was the silence of people who had run out of defenses and were sitting with what remained.