"And the true one?"
Her mother was silent for a long time. When she spoke again her voice was so quiet Nora had to lean forward.
"He looked at me," Diane said. "Grant. That's the true one. That's all it was. I was fifty-one and I hadn't been looked at in—I don't know. Years. I'd go to work and come home and your father would be in the garage and I'd eat dinner standing up at the counter. I got my hair cut and nobody noticed. And then your husband was in my kitchen asking me about paint colors, and he listened to me. He asked me what I thought. He said I had a good eye. He said I should've been a designer, I could've been anything. And I was so—hungry, Nora. I didn't know I was so hungry. And by the time I understood what I was doing, I'd already done it. And then I couldn't stop, because if I stopped, I'd have to go back to being nothing."
"You were never nothing. You were my mother."
"I know," Diane said. She looked up, finally, and her eyes were dry and very old. "That's the part I couldn't hold on to. I knew it, and I couldn't hold on to it. I don't know what that makes me."
Nora didn't answer. Somewhere in the house the refrigerator hummed and clicked off. The baby turned over, a long slow roll, a whale in deep water.
"He was going to leave me too," Diane said. "You know that, don't you? Once the money came through. I'm not stupid. I saw it in March, the first time he talked about the fourplex. He said 'my portfolio.' Not ours. I knew. I told myself I didn't." She almost smiled. "I'm a branch operations manager. I know what a man looks like when he's moving money away from you."
"Then why did you do the deed?"
"Because by then I'd already lied to everyone I loved," her mother said, "and he was the only one left who didn't hate me yet."
* * *
She didn't hug her mother. Later, she would wonder about that, about whether she should have—about whether, if Diane had died that winter, she'd regret it. She decided she wouldn't. Some doors you leave closed not out of cruelty but because opening them would take something you don't have.
At the front door, Diane stopped.
"The declaration," she said. "It'll cost me my commission. Probably my job. Maybe more. I asked a lawyer. Notary misconduct on a deed is a crime. I'll probably be charged."