That evening, I couldn’t sleep.
I got out of bed and went to the closet and pulled down the cardboard box. Not the RICHARD box. The older one, underneath it. The one with my notebooks from before. From college. From the first years we were married.
I sat on the bedroom floor with my back against the bed and flipped through them.
There were grocery lists. Phone numbers of people I couldn’t remember. A pressed flower that crumbled when I touched it.
And there, on a page from the year we got married, in my own young handwriting, with a little heart drawn next to it:
See Paris someday.
Richard and I had always dreamed of visiting Paris together. We talked about it the way young couples talk about winning the lottery. We’d stand in front of the travel posters at the library. We bought a French phrase book at a garage sale for a quarter. Richard used to practice with it in the bathroom mirror. “Où est la bibliothèque?” he’d say, in the worst accent you’ve ever heard. Where is the library. That was the only sentence he ever learned.
But there was always a reason to wait. The house needed a roof. Emma needed braces. The car broke down. Next year, we’d say. Next year for sure.
Then there was no next year.
I touched the faded ink with my fingertip.
“Well, Richard,” I whispered. “I guess I’m finally going.”
The bedroom was very quiet.
“I just wish you could come with me.”
The next morning, I called Emma.
She picked up on the first ring. She’d known about the appointment. I’d told her it was routine. She knew it wasn’t.
“Mom? What did they say?”
“I’m going to Paris,” I said.
There was silence on the line.
“Mom?”
“I’m going to Paris, Emma.”
“Mom. What did the doctor say?”
So I told her.
I told her the way I’d told parents things for thirty-nine years. Calmly. Simply. Without too many big words.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing. Then I heard her put her hand over the phone, and I heard a sound behind it that I knew she didn’t want me to hear.
When she came back, her voice was thick.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. And Paris?”
“I’ve never been abroad,” I said. “Not once in sixty-eight years. Your father and I always meant to go. I want to go, Emma. I want to see it. Before.”
She was quiet again.
Then she said, “Then you’re going.”
Just like that. No arguments. No Are you sure, Mom. No What about your treatment.
I think that’s when I realized my daughter had grown up into a better person than me.
Daniel was a different story.
He came over that Sunday for dinner. He drove two hours from Columbus with his wife, Rachel, and their two boys. I made pot roast, because it’s his favorite. I’d told him about the diagnosis on the phone. He’d been quiet. Daniel has always gone quiet when he’s scared. He’s just like his father that way.
He didn’t eat much pot roast.
After dinner, while Rachel took the boys out to the backyard, he helped me with the dishes. He washed. I dried. That’s how we’d always done it.
“Emma says you’re going to Paris,” he said, scrubbing a pot.
“I am.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Mom.” He put the pot down in the water. “You shouldn’t travel alone. Not now. What if something happens? What if you get sick on the plane?”
“Then there’ll be a plane full of people to help me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I can take a week off. Rachel’s fine with it. I already asked her.”
I put down the dish towel and looked at my son. He was forty-one years old. He had gray coming in at his temples. He had his father’s jaw and his father’s habit of rubbing the back of his neck when he was worried, which he was doing right now.
“Daniel,” I said. “I taught thirty eight-year-olds how to behave during fire drills. Every year, for thirty-nine years. I can manage an airport.”
He laughed, even though he didn’t want to.
“That’s not the same thing, Mom.”
“I know it’s not.” I picked up his wet hand and held it. “But I need to do this one by myself, honey. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never done anything by myself. Not really. I went from my parents’ house to your father’s house to being your mother. I’ve never even eaten in a restaurant alone.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Will you call me?” he said. “Every day?”
“Every day.”
“And if you feel bad, you’ll go to a doctor? You won’t be stubborn about it?”
“I’m always stubborn about it.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll go to a doctor,” I said.
He sighed and went back to the pot.
“Dad would’ve gone with you,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole problem.”
I got my first passport. I had to go to the post office and have my picture taken against a white wall. The man behind the counter told me not to smile. I looked like a woman being arrested for shoplifting.
I booked a modest hotel in a neighborhood I couldn’t pronounce. It had a little picture of a balcony with red flowers on the website. I booked it for eight nights.
I bought a plane ticket. Dayton to Chicago, Chicago to Paris. I bought it on the computer at the kitchen table, and my hands were shaking so badly that I typed my credit card number wrong three times.
When the confirmation email came, I printed it out and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an apple that a student had given me in 1994.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at it.
Then I opened my notebook and wrote Dear Richard, I bought the ticket, and I stopped.
I didn’t know what to write after that.
For the first time in thirty-two years, I didn’t finish a letter to him.
