Part Nine: Charlotte
The relationship with Charlotte was its own, slower thing.
Charlotte had not forgiven Thomas in the way that implies the matter is settled, because it was not settled and she was a person who did not pretend otherwise. She had been the child who was present at the hospital, who had rearranged her life without complaint, who had sat in the front row at the funeral beside the empty chair and had not looked at it once because she was too angry and too sad and looking at it would have broken something she needed to keep intact for the day.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” she told him, at their first real conversation, which happened in Eleanor’s kitchen because neutral ground was not yet available.
“I don’t want anything from you,” he said. “I know that sounds—” He stopped. “I want to do better. I don’t know how to ask you to believe that without asking you to do work you don’t owe me.”
Charlotte looked at him for a long moment. “Dad’s funeral, Thomas.”
“I know.”
“I can’t—” She stopped. “I don’t have anything to say yet.”
“Okay,” he said.
He didn’t press. He didn’t explain or contextualize or offer the version of events that would make his choice more understandable. He sat with the weight of it, which was the only thing available to him and the only thing she needed him to do.
The repair was slow and real. It did not follow a timeline anyone planned. There were conversations and then gaps and then more conversations. There was a birthday — Charlotte’s, the following spring — when Thomas sent flowers and a letter, not a card, a letter, that Charlotte did not mention but that Eleanor knew she had read because she saw it on her daughter’s table two weeks later, unthrown away.
A year after the funeral, Thomas suggested the visit to the cemetery.
It was just the three of them. A clear day, which felt significant though Eleanor knew weather had no intentions. They stood at Richard’s grave and were quiet for a while, which was appropriate.
“I missed his burial,” Thomas said. He was looking at the stone. “I don’t know how to — I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Become someone who would never make that choice again,” Eleanor said.
Charlotte said nothing. She put her hand briefly on Thomas’s arm, and then she was quiet again, and the three of them stood there in the November light, which was clear and cold and fell on everyone equally.
