"I wish he hadn't."
"Why?"
"Because I'm the mom," she said. "And the mom isn't supposed to have a thing that happened to her. The mom is supposed to just be the mom." She squeezed my foot. "I said it was fine, too. To him. When I was sixteen. I sat at the table and said, it's fine, Tata, and I meant it to make him feel better, and it did, and then I spent twenty-five years making sure nobody I love ever had to say it. And you said it anyway. To me. Every day. And I didn't hear it, because you said it the way I used to say it. Really well."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything, and she didn't either, and we sat there in the dark for a while. Downstairs the furnace came on, with the part that had cost two hundred and ten dollars in January, and the vents ticked.
"I'm going to call your father tomorrow," she said finally. "Not because of you. I want to be clear. This isn't something you did. This is something he did, and I'm going to have a conversation with him about it that I should have had in September, and it's probably going to involve a lawyer, and you're not going to hear it, because I'm going to sit in the car in the Kroger parking lot with the windows up. Okay?"
"Okay."
"And I'm going to figure out Orlando."
"How?"
"I don't know yet," she said. "That's the honest answer. I don't know yet. I'm going to ask some people for help, which I'm terrible at, and I'm going to see." She stood up. At the door she stopped. "Anca."
"Yeah."