wedding. She did not get to sit in a hospital waiting room while Kate was in labor, and she did not get to hold Mason on the first day he existed in the world. She did not get to be the mother who was there for all of it, and nothing about the reunion on Route 9 changed what those absences had cost.Some things cannot be returned. They can only be grieved honestly and placed somewhere, and then you keep going.
But she got this: a kitchen table in her son’s house, with crayons on it and a lunch box and a half-finished spelling worksheet with Mason’s name at the top. She got the cold Sprite bottle on the counter and the look on her son’s face when he held it. She got her grandson appearing in the kitchen doorway at some point late in the evening, still awake
