The Traveling Tea Shop (29 page)

My eyes were puffy for a whole week after meeting up with Jessica. The tears started the instant she walked in the room. I did look at her and see my mother, just as I had feared, but that actually gave me a rush of compassion, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in years. I hugged her right there and then, which took both of us by surprise. I think one of the reasons I moved so swiftly toward her was that I could see the drugs were gone. She looked like herself again—instead of some dark being crouching behind her eyes, they were clear and bright and hopeful.

She told me about the rehab program she had been attending and the new man in her life who is all vegan-tofu-yoga-crystals, so now I can despair of her in a whole new (but much healthier) way. We were holding hands so tightly as she spoke, like we were making up for lost time and trying to show each other that there would never be such a chasm between us again.

When she said she was sorry for everything that had happened, I felt such a sense of release. That little word, when heartfelt, can mean so much. Suddenly the burden of grief was no longer exclusively mine. We would bear it together, and blame would be edged out with love and understanding. Just as my mother would have wished.

“You know I tried to find him? Our father?” she said at one point.

“And did you?”

She nodded. “He wasn’t even that far away. Just the next town over. But he didn’t want to meet up. He said his life had moved on and that I needed to do the same.” She shook her head. “When I think of all the years I took out my hurt on you and Mum, the people who were actually there for me . . .” And then she took a breath. “So now I’m in the mode of making amends. And the only way I can think of to make it up to Mum is to make it right with you.”

And the funny thing is that in that moment all I felt was grateful. For a while there I had lost my mum
and
my sister. But now I’m back in touch with the one person who knew all my mother’s delightful ways as well as me, the one person who knew what it was like to grow up in her care and call her Mum—the person who could trigger a million happy memories. And so that’s what we did. We brought her back to life with our conversation.

And now I feel her with me all the more.

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