“Take all the time you need,” Paul said.
I walked to the back door, stepped out into the garden, and sat down on the old bench Margaret and I had bought at a yard sale twenty years ago.
The wood was cold through my graduation gown.
Her handwriting covered both sides of two pages.
I had to hold the paper close in the dim light from the kitchen window.
*My darling boys,*
*I am writing this because there are things a mother should say to her sons while she still can, and I have waited too long already.*
*I have watched you treat your father as though his life ended when he turned sixty.
As though his grief was an inconvenience.
As though the money he saved over forty years of hard work belonged to you by right, simply because you expected it to.*
*I want you to understand something.
