That evening, after Eleanor was gone, June sat at the condo table amid the remaining boxes and cried in a way she had not cried at the cemetery.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just continuously, the tears falling while she folded tissue paper around old photographs. Michael asked if she wanted privacy. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I think I’m crying because it’s finally become possible to miss him without defending myself.” Michael sat down across from her and understood exactly what she meant.
A week later, Eleanor invited Michael over for meatloaf and showed him something she had tucked in the back of one of the returned letter bundles.
It was a photograph of Thomas in fatigues holding six-year-old Michael on his shoulders, both of them laughing at something outside the frame. On the back Eleanor had written in blue ink, If we keep doing this, maybe we become a real family. Michael stared at the sentence for a long time.
“We were a real family,” he said.
Eleanor nodded once, eyes on the photograph. “I know that now in a way I didn’t for a while. Divorce made me want to declare the whole thing fraudulent, and it wasn’t. It was real. It just wasn’t forever.” She looked up at him. “Tell me something honest. Did you hate me for how I acted after he died?”
Michael answered with the care deserved by any mother brave enough to ask a question whose answer might hurt. “No,” he said. “I was angry sometimes. I was tired a lot. But I never thought your pain was fake.”