“Every day,” Mason repeated. Quiet, even, which with Mason means he’s doing math. “For seventeen years.”
“Every day.”
She opened the folder then, and I watched her play what she thought was her winning hand. Photographs. The boys as newborns, in her arms, in the hospital. A few baby pictures. She held them out like proof of something.
“Look,” she said, her voice going soft and practiced. “I kept these. All this time. You were always my babies. And I know I can’t get those years back, but I’m here now, and I was thinking— a graduation is a family day. We could walk in together. The four of us. I could finally be there for you. We could be a family again.” She looked, just briefly, past us at the house, the truck, the life. “I don’t have anyone else, boys. You’re all I have left.”
And there it was. There’s always a there it is.
