Building a Home with My Husband by Rachel Simon Page B

never considered it pertaining to me. But there it was, and it said to me, You have a choice. You can keep on hating her, or you can decide to forgive her, and as accustomed as you are to the lures of hatred, it has not done well by you.
    I walked back to the table, sat back down, and, without saying a word about what had just happened, committed myself to forgiveness. It was not easy then or for a long time, and it never intoxicated me like hatred. But it stilled the storm. Over the next three years, I helped Laura, then Max, then Beth come back to my mother, and as I did I said to myself that maybe family isn’t propaganda any more than forgiveness is. Maybe I just have to recognize that, behind the storybooks and TV shows and every door in every house is indeed a bunch of fractured selves. Just like me. Taken over by hatred, too, or hatred’s cronies: rage, sanctimoniousness, judgmentalism, self-loathing. But I knew now how awful all of that felt. I knew, too, as I came to understand my mother’s story, that she had acted not out of malice, but weakness. That she had not schemed to make me feel shattered by her actions, but had just felt so compelled by her own misery that she couldn’t help herself. This, I now knew, was what most of us do all our lives. Or until we find ourselves standing in the back of a restaurant, making a choice we’d never known was there to make.
    Leaving behind hatred and my narrow view of family, I never sought out either again.
     
    Look at how ahead of schedule we already are! We thought the movers would get to the rented house at one, but it’s only noon. Might we escape unscathed? Don’t hope too hard, I think, as they take the opportunity of the halfway mark to break for lunch, and Hal goes into the kitchen to nibble on leftover pizza. But I try to influence fate. I plug in fans to cool the house down. I find the checkbook. Then I run out of things to do, and perch on a box and fidget.
    It’s just not like me to sit around. It’s sure not like me to keep to myself. So, despite the risk of annoying Hal, I find a jug of water, go out to the boiling driveway, walk up to the movers standing in their truck, and ask, “You guys want something to drink?”
    “That’s all right,” Jimmy says, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.
    “We picked up Gatorade when we dropped the second truck off on our way here,” Melvin adds. He lifts a bottle to show me.
    “This whole thing must be brutal,” I say. “Just keeping going. The heat.”
    Jimmy says, “Yeah, it’s rough.”
    I could just walk off and find some shade, and if Hal were out here, perhaps I would. But as I learned whenever I moved, every single person is so filled with stories that all I have to do is strike up a conversation with genuine curiosity and a patient ear. Then the weightiest of concerns will make way for new fascinations, and soon my discomfort will lift. Or, as I’ve always seen it, moving, more than anything else, is how I learned to speak to strangers.
    I dive in. How did they come to work for Dinkins & Sons? Jimmy, an electrician, has had trouble finding work in his field. Melvin, a mechanic, is earning money to open a garage. Albert, the only one who sees himself as a moving professional, is studying for a degree in business before his body gives out. Each story, brief though it is, moves me, as Jimmy and Albert become more expressive, and Melvin’s liveliness is further fueled by his ambition.
    What is a good move? I ask myself as I listen. I’ve always thought it meant that nothing gets broken. But might it also be a move where something unexpected is gained?
     
    The move into the house begins. While Albert and Jimmy hoist the sofa and Melvin tackles the IKEA panels, I linger on the front yard, examining this building that I will soon call my home. A two-story brick twin, it resembles the house that Hal and I rented after our first five years of living together. We remarked on this to each other