Yesterday my mother turned ninety.
I did not call.
There was a time when I would have spent the day thinking about the telephone, imagining her voice, the first awkward words, the possibility of something that had never happened before.
An apology, perhaps. Or simply my name spoken without accusation.
But yesterday I had coffee. I read the news. I went about my business.
My mother turned ninety and I did not call.
I suppose she is an old woman now.
I suppose she has her routines, her familiar rooms, the small indignities of age.
I wonder if she thinks of me.
Not often, perhaps. Perhaps not at all.
I used to find that unbearable.
Now I find it sad in the way one finds an abandoned house sad,
knowing that people once lived there, that meals were eaten,
that someone washed the windows and expected to grow old.
She had two sons.
One hurt the other.
When the younger spoke, she chose the older.
There are explanations, I am sure. There are always explanations.
Fear. Shame. The terrible inconvenience of believing a child.
I have spent enough years trying to understand them.
I am sixty-three years old. I have a wife who loves me.
I have made things.
I have done some good.
I have become a man my mother does not know.
And I think, sometimes, what a pity.
Not for me, particularly.
For her.
She had a good son.
A very good son.
She could have known him.
Instead, somewhere, an old woman turns ninety and a man who once called her Mother finishes his coffee and goes about his day.
There is no justice in this.
No lesson worth extracting.
No final conversation in which the truth is spoken and everyone weeps.
I will not call.
Not because I hate her. Not because I have forgotten.
But because I know what another silence would cost me.
And I have paid enough.
Yesterday my mother turned ninety.
I hope she had a good birthday.
I wonder who brought the cake,
whether there were candles,
whether someone helped her cut the first piece.
I wonder if she laughed.
I hope she did.
I really do.
