He seemed surprised.
“Both of us?”
“No. Just you.”
A pause.
“Farah won’t like that.”
“That sentence is part of why I want you to come alone.”
He was quiet.
Then he said, “Thursday?”
“Thursday.”
He arrived at six fifteen carrying grocery-store flowers.
I looked at them and started laughing.
He smiled, embarrassed.
“I know. It’s stupid.”
“No. They’re nice.”
“They were by the checkout.”
“I assumed you didn’t harvest them yourself.”
That was enough to let some of the tension out of the room.
I put the flowers in the blue pitcher George used to use for lemonade.
Dinner was chicken and rice, green beans, and biscuits from a tube because I had no desire to perform motherhood by making them from scratch.
For the first twenty minutes, we discussed everything except the cabin.
Weather.
Theo’s work.
A neighbor’s tree that had fallen across a fence.
His sister’s plan to visit at Thanksgiving.
Then Theo set down his fork.
“I knew she was doing it.”
“I figured.”
“No. I mean I knew the whole thing. The listing. The pictures. The pricing.”
“The lockbox?”
He rubbed his forehead.
“Yes.”
I waited.
“She found the information from when we all stayed up there two summers ago. I told her where the spare was.”
“Why?”
“Because she said she needed to see whether the key still worked.”
“And you knew why.”
“Yes.”
That hurt more than I expected.
He kept his eyes on the table.
“She’d been looking at rentals in the area. Some of them make good money during fall and summer.”
“I know.”
“She kept saying it made no sense for your place to sit empty.”
“I remember.”
“I told her you’d said no.”
“Then what happened?”
He gave a tired laugh.
“She said you always say no before you’ve had time to think about things.”
“And?”
“She said we should list a few open dates, get a booking, show you what it could make, and then you’d see it differently.”
“That sounds like Farah.”
Theo stared at his plate.
“I didn’t want to fight with her.”
There it was.
Not a complicated scheme.
Not a son plotting against his mother.
He had chosen the easiest conversation in the moment and left the harder one for somebody else.
“She was already upset about money,” he said. “Every conversation became about what we needed to cut, what we couldn’t afford, how I wasn’t bringing in enough. Then she’d say the cabin could solve part of it, and I’d say it wasn’t ours. She’d say I never stand up to you. I’d tell her there was nothing to stand up to because it’s your property.”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“One night I just stopped arguing.”
“And you told yourself that wasn’t the same as agreeing.”
His eyes met mine.
“Yeah.”
“You’ve done that before.”
He gave me a humorless smile.
“I know.”
“When you were fourteen, you let Jeremy bring beer into our garage because technically you weren’t the one who bought it.”
“Mom.”
“I’m serious.”
“I was fourteen.”
“And at thirty-two you let a contractor start ripping out your bathroom before the permit came through because technically he was the one who said it would be fine.”
Theo groaned.
“I forgot about that.”
“I didn’t.”
For a moment, we both smiled.
Then I said, “You don’t get to build an adult life around waiting for other people to make the uncomfortable decisions.”
He nodded slowly.
I was careful with what I said next.