"You never told me any of this," I said. "Not once. You let me grow up thinking — I don't know what I thought. That you didn't care about it. That you'd just gone to work at the dentist's and that was what you wanted. And the whole time it was me. I was the belly. I'm the reason you didn't walk. And then you wanted me to wear the dress so I'd fix it. So it would all come out even. And when I didn't —"
"That's not —"
"It is, though, Mom. It is."
She didn't say anything for a while. Then she said, "Yes. It is."
I'd wanted her to fight me. Agreeing was so much worse.
"I'm not going to say I'm sorry tonight," my mother said. "I want to. But if I say it right now I'll be saying it so you'll stop looking at me like that. And that's not a good enough reason. I'll say it when I've figured out what it's for."
I got up. My legs were stiff. I stood there by the table looking down at my mother in her torn bathrobe with her hands on her old dress, and for the first time in my life she looked to me like what she'd been, once, which was a seventeen-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom with the window open, listening to somebody read her name three miles away.
"I said some things about the dress," I said. "In March. About it being yellow. And about not being you."
"You did."
"I'm sorry I said them like that. I'm not sorry I'm going to Vermont. But I'm sorry I said them like that."