Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

He couldn’t explain to her that he needed the trees and the quiet as a correction for what he saw on the job, how crossing a bridge and having that physical barrier between him and his beat felt like leaving one life and entering another.

He knew it didn’t quite have anything to do with him, but some days, often when he least expected it, he removed his sympathy from her and took it back to wrap around himself. Sometimes it all seemed temporary, a thing they had to get through, and sometimes it seemed like this was always the way things would be, that he’d stay silent and do his work and be a good boy all in hopes of a change that would never come.

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

while he lightened her burden, he felt he’d lightened his, too. It was the truth,

the scariest person from her childhood was at that moment sitting in her living room, waiting for her, and that their worry for Peter, the person they each loved most, bound them, put them in the same boat together, and they could either row hard as one or else drift while he drowned nearby.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.