The Names

by Florence Knapp

Do you not see the risk? she’d wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn’t. Because surely that was the point.

Cora wants to say it matters because sometimes big men feel small inside.

“Tradition is just important to some people,” she says instead. “Having your own name is too, though. Sometimes? Maybe even Dad would’ve liked having his own one.” Cora takes a hand off the pram to wrap her arm around Maia’s shoulder. “Wise girl.”

Isn’t she just teaching her daughter that keeping the peace is more important than doing what’s right? Cora wonders what Maia thinks of her for agreeing to give her brother this name that will tie him to generations of domineering men. And it dawns on her that while Maia’s name was originally intended as a silent bond between them, in revealing its meaning, that, too, may be a burden. Perhaps she has unwittingly sent a message that their lives are destined to follow the same path, when her real hope is for her children to tread their own.

She knows this will be a defining moment in Maia’s life, a moment when she was given a voice and wasn’t asked to fit into the shadow of her parents’ marriage.

And Cora realizes her daughter has learned what to do. How to soothe, to placate. That just through watching, the first time she’s stepped into this role, she is already accomplished. If it doesn’t stop, Cora thinks, this pattern will repeat unendingly, the destiny of each generation set on the same course.

Maia felt elated to be included in his wildness.

Bear gives his love as easily as he is loved, but all of them know his heart belongs to Maia.

And so they’d sat in the living room—Cora, Maia, and Bear—and listened as the car pulled away, leaving them in eerie silence, the quiet somehow bigger than the space her mother had taken up. And even though Cora hadn’t wanted her to go, she’d needed to know she was capable of doing this alone. Whatever this may be.

There was an ease in doing things as they came to them, and Cora wondered at the structure that had metered out their days to that point. At how, in Gordon going, they’d also cast off all the other strictures that ordered their lives.

In the beginning, Cora had tried to stop her from always helping with Bear, but the counselor said people often did instinctively what was needed to heal. “You’ll see if it’s too much for her.”

Bear is definitely Maia’s baby🥺