Building a Home with My Husband by Rachel Simon Page A

the house before my usual awkward reply.
    So, cruising down the road toward this next lock in our moving day canal, I accelerate through the memories, taking them up to just before we met.
    After that fate-bending February day when I was sixteen, there followed many moves, from boarding school to my father’s during the summers, from my father’s to college, from college into a house in Philadelphia with two friends. On the rare occasions when my mother came up in conversation, I would cut it off by saying that she’d disappeared, which, for all intents and purposes, she had. But in fact I had learned where she was. One day, my father happened to see her name in the local newspaper among the public notices of bankruptcies. It couldn’t possibly be her—she’d never been to that part of Pennsylvania. But when Laura and Beth drove to the address, there was our mother, living only half an hour away. It was a short, tense visit. She told them where she worked, and that she was no longer with the ex-con, but expressed no interest in us. Furious and confused, they left, and we heard nothing for years.
    Of course, once hatred has coursed down your throat and entered your veins and soaked your bones, it seduces you. It has so much to recommend it—its flair for absolutism simplifies decisions, its fervor incites self-importance, its potency generates arrogance. Besotted with hatred, I felt new selves deploying inside me: incisive, disdainful, battle-ready.
    Except that they failed to crush my now prodigious self-doubt. Otherwise, why would I have selected college boyfriends who were hostile to relationships? Why would I have felt breathless with envy when friends talked lightheartedly about their families? Why, when a therapist dared suggest that someday I should track my mother down, did I not slam out of his office? Apparently hatred, for all its bluster and might, hadn’t utterly overpowered me.
    Perhaps that’s why, the spring before I graduated, I did look up the number of the library where my mother had said she worked. Not that I was going to call, as the therapist had urged. I was just going to . . . carry her number around. I did this for a year until, at a particularly despairing moment during my first job after college, I pulled it out and my fingers dialed the number and I kept the phone to my mouth and asked for her department. It was six years after I’d left the house on the lake—the same amount of time I would later be apart from Hal. My mother picked up. I said who I was. Instantly, she started crying, thanking me for calling, gushing her desire to see me. I was speechless. Why, in all this time, hadn’t she called us ? Wasn’t she the parent?
    I didn’t get my answer until I saw her face-to-face soon after, when we arranged to meet for dinner. Hatred roared inside me as we sat down and ordered our meal, yet I kept it to myself, surprised to see that she carried herself with the same old meekness and lack of self-regard. And when I contained myself enough to ask why she hadn’t called, I was just as surprised at her answer: “Because I thought you’d reject me.” Wait, I wanted to say, you’ve got the whole thing wrong! Instead, I was so taken aback that I went to collect myself in the ladies’ room.
    I stood in front of the restroom mirror, and let the hatred surge through me. Leave right now, it demanded. Dump her. But when I stepped back into the restaurant and looked at her from afar, I saw a little, forlorn, gray-haired woman who was so unable to see how family was supposed to work that she thought her children had authority over her . Why she was this way—what storms she’d weathered in her own childhood—I had yet to discover, and I didn’t ask myself that now. Rather, standing in the restaurant watching her, I felt something unfamiliar rise inside me. I had heard the word for it before—“forgiveness”—but having viewed it as the realm of the gullible and small-minded, I’d