She was grateful for what time her mother had with her son, she supposed. Although little boy-world was about as comprehensible to Emily as a George Foreman grill.
(And, if she were honest, it wasn't so crystal to her either)
But the fact of him had delighted Emily.
His experimentation with the French soap in the guest powder room, however, had not. And though she had clapped her hand over his mouth before he could clearly holler, 'You won't get Muscle-Man this time, Grandma!'as Emily gaped, startled beyond speech, at the formerly lovely toile wallpaper, she had not screeched at the little guy after all.
That was his mother's job, she gritted her teeth at the memory: Brat.
No, in life Emily had never quite appreciated the hilarity of boys. Her own level of appreciation, in fact, was as variable as a hot flash.
She gazed down the long hall to the little man's ajar door, and then padded softly to it.
He looked even younger asleep, if that was possible, as she straightened the covers around him. He had his father's stillness in sleep, which belied his mother's hyperactivity in wide-awake-ville.
And suddenly she was crying.
Not the loud gulping sobs which had unaccountably bubbled up from nowhere in the weeks following Emily's death—at the oddest times; while folding laundry, or walking through the market. But a hollow, silent, slow cry.
Things were going too fast, too fast, even though nothing was really happening at all.
Work was well, the dramatic mini-series that had been her life while her mother still lived had settled to more of a cozy sort of dramedy. A bittersweet one in which walks in the snow were meaningful.
No, things weren't fast in the old way.
Fast in the new way, though. Fast in the way your child suddenly looks older after getting a haircut. Or, in the laugh you choke back when he later catches a glance of himself in a window and says, 'I forgot I look like that now'. Fast in the way that now your parents are gone and here your child has already grown into someone else.
Someone older whom they do not know.
And, of course, this is right, and the way things should be. And we can't all keep tripping down main street in stilettos and over-priced jeans forever.
But how sad it is that just when balance has been struck, just when the complete picture is in place, and even though you have to keep adjusting the horizontal hold so it doesn't blur away...
Just when you've got the trick of things, in other words, the one person who you still want to be proud of you, if she ever was, has gone.
Has gone.
And fast again, because then the little guy, this small constantly-scraped-somewhere human, for whom you would die, who drives his father insane with jam at breakfast every morning, has awakened and needs to pee. And he is still so half asleep, you have to hurry ahead of him to open the bathroom door so he won't conk right into it...
That fast. The present becoming the distant past so quickly.
Too fast to dwell. That's what her life is. Which, she supposes, is how it's designed to be.
So she swipes away the few fallen tears.
God, how she'd love to veg in front of an old movie right now.
But there's work tomorrow, and school for the little guy, and Rory's supposed to call, and a thousand other things too.
So, as she settles in under the quilt, her husband already oblivious beside her, and twists her hair for awhile anyway, briefly fretting that forty-something is too old to be 'Mama', but what can she do?
She's sure as hell not sending him back.
And the visual this presents both repels her and makes her giggle at once.
She gets quiet fast though, when her husband stirs.
And in the quiet blackness of her room that night, however far away the parts of her heart which reside in her parents and grown daughter may be, she knows that her's is a lucky life.