She also made one request.
“If my son ever starts acting like a fool, don’t protect him from me.”
I laughed when she said it.
“Margaret, he’s a grown man.”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t be an idiot.”
She was smiling, but there was something serious behind her eyes.
“My husband was a good man in many ways,” she told me.
“But there was a period when he started taking me for granted.
I made the mistake of thinking that if I loved him enough, he’d eventually notice what he was doing.”
She touched my hand.
“Love is not supposed to require you to disappear.”
I remembered those words months later, sitting alone in my car.
The problem was that I had stopped telling her the truth.
Whenever Margaret called, I said I was fine.
If she asked about Ryan, I told her work was busy.
