“You look upset,” Mother said, sipping her wine.
It was a strangely intimate observation for her mother to make. Normally, Jude would have smiled and made up a pretty excuse, but she had been undone by Lexi’s return, by that damned letter, by the obvious pain her son was now in—all of it. She had no strength left, and she was afraid, even though she didn’t know what scared her. Staying put? Letting go? Holding on? Nothing felt safe anymore. And she wanted someone to talk to, someone to help her find a way out. But her mother was hardly that person.
She wanted to smile and change the subject and pretend she had nothing pressing on her mind, but her whole life was falling apart, it seemed, and she had no strength left for pretense. “Why is it we never really talk?” she said slowly. “I don’t even know you. And you certainly don’t know me. Why is that?”
Her mother put down her wine glass. Backlit by the gray day, she looked ethereal. For the first time, Jude noticed how old her mother looked, how tired. Her shoulders were thin as bird bones and her spine had begun to curve forward. “You, of all people, should understand, Judith.” Her mother’s voice was sharp and thin, a razor blade, but the look in her eyes was perhaps the softest expression Jude had ever seen. There was sadness there. Had it always been there?
“Why should I understand?”
Her mother glanced out the window. “I loved your father,” she said quietly, a crack in her voice. “After he passed, I knew I had you to care for, and I wanted to care for you, to love you … but there was nothing inside me. Even my ability to paint vanished. I thought it would last for a day or a week.” She looked at Jude. “It just went on and on, and when it finally lifted enough that I could breathe, you were gone from me. I didn’t even know how to get you back.”
Jude stared at her mother in shock. How was it that she’d never made this connection? She’d known that her mother quit painting on the day of her father’s funeral, that she’d walked out of the house and never returned, not really.
“I watched the kind of mother you became, and I was so proud of you. But I never said that. You wouldn’t have heard me anyway, although perhaps I want to think that. Either way, I didn’t say it. Then I saw you make the same mistake I did: I saw you stop loving Zach … and yourself. It broke my heart. I would have told you what you were doing wrong, but you were always so sure that I was weak and you were strong. So yes, Judith, you—of all people, you—should understand my mistakes. You should know why I treated you the way I did.”
Jude didn’t know what to say. It felt as if her whole life, her whole identity, had just cracked open.
Her mother got to her feet. For a second, Jude thought she was going to walk over here, cross the distance between them, and maybe even sit down beside her. “You’re young,” her mother said finally. “You can undo this mistake.”
Jude felt herself starting to shake. Here it was, the thing she’d been afraid of. “How?”
“People think love is an act of faith,” her mother said. “Sometimes it’s an act of will. I didn’t have the strength to love you, Jude—or to show that love, I guess. I don’t know which it was, and in the end, what’s the difference? You’re stronger than I ever was.”
In a way, it was the same thing Dr. Bloom had been saying for years. Jude glimpsed the regret in her mother’s gaze, and it was like looking into her own future. She didn’t want to someday be eighty years old and alone. “I’m not the only one who can undo a mistake, Mom.”
“I’m not young anymore,” her mother said. “I’ve missed my chance. I know that.”
“That’s what the lunches were about.”
“Of course.”