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manslaughter.” My lips feel too stiff to answer. I put one hand protectively over Dad’s.
I’ve started seeing a counselor to help me work through a lifetime of beliefs that need changing. It’s an amazing process to begin to understand that I couldn’t possibly have ever been enough for my mother, no matter what I’d managed to accomplish. Even if I’d gone into politics and managed to be the first woman in the White House, she would have still needed me to be more. So right now I’m working on being enough for me.
Elle sniffles. “It’s just—I thought Grandma should know. That we found Aunt Marley. And that you’re with Tony. And that Dad didn’t win the court case.” All at once it dawns on me what Elle is trying to get to. Marley’s face mirrors my thoughts, and I know she sees it, too. My mother—our mother—somehow found the strength to break free of the chains of her own family. Her mother, her grandmother, her mother-in-law, all were suppressed and beaten down by life and their husbands. Love for her daughters gave Mom the strength to break free from indoctrination and violence, to create a reality in
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Right there in the middle of the empty graveyard on a Tuesday morning in June, she starts to sing. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me . . . Her voice floats up, up into the blue sky, strong and true. I join in with harmony on the next lines. I once was lost, but now am found Was blind, but now I see. And then Elle, who has seldom been to a church but has managed to learn this song somewhere, somehow, despite all that, joins in.
