“You asked me earlier why I chose my career over Michael,” she said, hoping this wasn’t a mistake.
Seth nodded.
“Well, in the first place, I never saw the divorce as final. I could never quite
convince myself that our marriage was over.” She grinned nervously. “I guess the past few years have proven that I was right.”
At Seth’s pointed look, Susan continued. “Mom called me into her room before she died” She took a deep breath.
“I remember.” Signaling a turn, Seth headed back toward the more upscale part of town. “Scott, Sean, Stephen and I were all sent to the cafeteria. I think Spencer was still in school.”
“Right.” Susan squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to remember that day so clearly. “Anyway, she made me promise never to tell you guys what she told me.”
“But you’re going to tell me.” Seth’s words were more a demand than a question.
Studying her little brother, Susan wondered if she should. If her secret would help at all. “Mom wasn’t always a meek, mothering soul, Seth,” she started. “She’d wanted more than just about anything to go school to learn fashion design.”
“You’re kidding.”
Susan had had a hard time believing the news herself, except when she’d looked into her dying mother’s eyes and seen the broken dreams there.
“Anyway.” She blinked the memory away. “She married Daddy and he had specific ideas about a woman’s place. She was to cook and clean, of course, but she was also the warmth, the nurturing, the mothering that every family needs. His role was the provider, the protector.”
“Right,” Seth broke in impatiently.
“Mom was content to live under Dad’s loving care, his protection, happy to have his children, to care for them. For us. Most of the time...”
She stopped abruptly, swallowing back her own tears as she remembered the tears dripping slowly from her mother’s eyes that day.
“But growing up, I hated how she always settled—how I was supposed to settle, too. It pissed me off that I had to do dishes every night while you guys got to go out and shoot hoops. I had to put away everyone’s laundry twice a week while the five of you took turns taking out the trash once in a while. I wanted to play Little League with you and instead I got to watch from the sidelines. Hell—” she laughed without humor “—Dad wouldn’t even let me have a turn when he took the five of you to the batting cages. If I got to go at all, I had to be content to watch.”
Seth’s jaw was working while he stared out the windshield. “I never knew it bothered you so much.”
“Mom did.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“I did. All the time. Nobody listened.”
“I—maybe you just—we didn’t...did we?” Glancing quickly at Susan, Seth muttered, “I guess maybe you’re right.”
They fell silent, both of them lost in their own thoughts, their own memories. Not all of them bad.
“That day, in Mom’s room...” Susan needed to finish what she’d started. “She told me she’d always understood how I felt, that she’d been rooting for me all those years.”
“Then why didn’t she do anything about it?”
Susan had wondered that herself. Many times. “I guess because then she’d have had to cross Dad and that wasn’t something she ever did.
“But that day in the hospital, she spoke up. She told me she wanted more for me than she’d ever had herself, more from me than she’d ever given.” She looked over at her brother. “She said I was the part of her she’d never had the courage to be.”
“That doesn’t even sound like Mom.”
“I know.” Susan remembered her own shock as if she’d only heard the words yesterday. “And that’s not all. She told me that only through my courage to be more in life could she finally be complete.”
Seth swore. “That’s a hell of a burden to place on anyone.”
Charging on, Susan had to finish, to get it all out. “She told me to believe in myself, to be strong, to be whatever my heart told me I needed to be.” She’d also told Susan, in a breathless whisper, not to forget about the part of herself that was a woman.