“I love you,” I said. “I always will. I’ll still be your mother when I come home. But I’m also going to be Diane. And I’d really like you to meet her.”
I smiled.
“Merry Christmas, sweetheart,” I said. “Tell the kids I’m painting a picture for each of them.”
I watched the video once. Then I sent it before I could change my mind.
Then I put my phone face down on the stone bench and went inside to make a second cup of coffee.
Part Nine: Christmas in Charlotte
I didn’t hear from Derek on Christmas Day.
I heard from Joanna, who sent a photo of herself in pajamas holding a mug that said World’s Okayest Physical Therapist. I heard from my neighbor in Raleigh, who was watering my plants. I heard from Rui at the café, who stopped by with a plate of cookies his mother had made.
But nothing from Derek.
I found out later what happened.
Joanna told me some of it. Derek told me the rest, weeks later, sitting across from me at a small table in a Portuguese café.
Cassandra had tried to cook Christmas dinner herself. She’d watched videos. She’d made lists. She’d ordered everything from a fancy grocery delivery service.
At two o’clock on Christmas afternoon, with twenty guests arriving at four, the turkey was still half frozen in the middle. The sweet potatoes had burned on the bottom. The gravy had separated into something that looked like dishwater.
Cassandra locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and cried.
Derek stood alone in the kitchen with a half-raw turkey and no idea what to do.
He told me he picked up his phone to call me. Out of habit. Mom will know.
Then he remembered I was in Portugal.
He told me it was the first time in his adult life that he’d faced a problem without calling me first.
He watched my video standing at the kitchen counter, next to the half-frozen turkey.
He watched it twice.
Then Maddie came into the kitchen. She’s ten, and she notices everything.
“Is that Grandma?” she asked. “Where is she?”
“Portugal,” Derek said.
“Why?”
Derek told me he didn’t know how to answer her.
So Maddie took his phone and watched the video herself. She watched the part about the waterfall. She watched the part about the lemon tree. She watched the part where I said, I don’t think you know very much about me that isn’t food.
Then she looked up at her father.
“Dad,” she said. “Did you know Grandma went to New Zealand by herself?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever ask her about it?”
Derek stood in his kitchen with a raw turkey and his ten-year-old daughter looking at him.
“No,” he said.
He ordered pizza for twenty people. Cassandra’s mother, Renee, was horrified. Her sister brought a store-bought pie. Everyone ate pepperoni on Cassandra’s gold-rimmed plates under the eucalyptus branches.
Derek said it was the best Christmas dinner he’d had in years. Nobody had to spend three hours in the kitchen. Everybody sat at the table the whole time.
That night, after the guests left, Derek found Cassandra sitting on the bathroom floor, still in her cream sweater, holding a dish towel.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I don’t know how she does it. Every year. Every holiday. I didn’t know it was this hard.”
Derek sat down next to her.
“Neither did I,” he said.
They talked for a long time on that bathroom floor, under the sign that said Family Is Everything.
Cassandra told him something she’d never told him before. Her mother had never cooked a single holiday meal. Renee had always hired help, and she’d taught Cassandra that a woman’s worth was how beautiful she made things look. Not how much work she put into them.
“When your mom showed up with all that food,” Cassandra said, “every single year, I felt like she was showing me up. Like she was better at being a mother than I’d ever be. So I made her into the help. Because if she was the help, I didn’t have to compare myself to her.”
Derek told her something too.
He told her that when his father died, he’d been so scared that he never let himself grieve. He’d decided the safest thing was to let his mother handle everything, because she seemed so strong. And then he’d never stopped.
“I’ve been leaning on her for twenty-five years,” he said. “And I never once asked if she was tired.”
Part Ten: The Visitor
On January ninth, there was a knock on my door in Óbidos.
I opened it expecting Fernanda. She’d promised to bring me a book about Portuguese tile painting.
Instead, Derek was standing on the cobblestones.
He was holding a small suitcase and looking very out of place in a puffy American winter jacket.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
I stared at him.
“How did you find me?”
“Joanna,” he said. “She had the address. She made me promise not to tell you I was coming. She said if I called first, you’d tell me not to waste the money.”
I almost laughed. That was exactly what I would have said.
“Can I come in?” Derek asked.
I made coffee. He sat at the little wooden table under the kitchen window. He looked around at the tiles, the copper pots, my watercolors drying on a string across the corner.
“Did you paint these?” he asked.
“I did.”
He got up and looked at them closely. The lemon tree. The town wall at sunset. Fernanda’s bookstore with candlelight in the windows.
“Mom,” he said quietly. “These are really good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He sat back down.
“I came to ask you something,” he said.
“All right.”
He took a breath.
“Tell me about the waterfall,” he said. “In New Zealand. In Milford Sound. I want to hear the whole thing.”
I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t.
Then I sat down across from my son, and I told him.
I told him about flying sixteen hours alone to Auckland and being so scared at the airport that I almost turned around. About renting a car and driving on the wrong side of the road. About the ferry through the fjord, and the black water, and the cliffs that went straight up into the clouds.
I told him about the moment the captain steered us under the waterfall, and the mist soaked everybody, and I stood at the rail laughing with tears running down my face because I couldn’t believe I was really there.
Derek listened to every word. He didn’t look at his phone once.
When I finished, he was quiet for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For Thanksgiving. For staring at my plate. For every time I let Cassie say something like that and didn’t stop her. For every time I apologized to you in private and then let it happen again.”
He looked down at the table.
“I’m sorry I never asked,” he said.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked gently.
He thought about it.
“Because if I asked what you wanted,” he said, “I might have found out you wanted something other than us. And I didn’t know who I’d be if you weren’t taking care of me.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“That’s a pretty pathetic thing for a forty-year-old man to admit,” he said.
“It’s an honest thing,” I said. “That’s not the same as pathetic.”
Part Eleven: The Wall
Derek stayed for five days.
I showed him everything. We walked the town wall at sunrise. We ate pastries at Rui’s café, and Rui told Derek in very loud Portuguese that his mother was the best customer in Óbidos. We spent an afternoon in Fernanda’s church bookstore, and Fernanda gave Derek a long, appraising look over her glasses.
“So you’re the son,” she said.
“I’m the son,” Derek said.
“Your mother is a remarkable woman,” Fernanda said. “I hope you know that.”
“I’m learning,” Derek said.
I took him to Lúcia’s watercolor class on Tuesday morning. He was even worse than I’d been. His lemon tree looked like a fried egg.
Lúcia patted him on the shoulder and said, “Good. Very bad. Now we can begin.”
Derek laughed so hard he had to put down his brush.
On his last night, we sat in the courtyard under the lemon tree with two small glasses of ginjinha. The air was cold, and I’d wrapped myself in the quilt from upstairs.
“Cassie wanted to come,” Derek said. “She didn’t think you’d want her here.”
“Probably not yet,” I said honestly.
He nodded.
“She sent something,” he said.
He took an envelope out of his jacket and handed it to me.
Inside was a handwritten card. Cassandra’s elegant script, but shakier than usual.
Diane, I’m sorry for what I said at Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a joke. It was something I said because I felt small next to you, and making you small felt easier than admitting that. I tried to cook Christmas dinner. It was a disaster. We had pizza. I finally understood how much work you’d been doing for eight years without anyone saying thank you. So thank you. I hope you’re happy in Portugal. I hope you paint something beautiful. — Cassandra
Tucked into the card was a photograph.
It showed a pie on Cassandra’s kitchen counter. A lopsided, slightly burned pecan pie with the crust collapsed on one side.
On the back, she’d written: My first one. It took three tries. Will you teach me when you come home? Only if you want to.
I looked at it for a long time.
“She made that?” I asked.
“Last weekend,” Derek said. “She burned two of them. She wouldn’t let me help.”
I laughed. I couldn’t stop.
“It’s terrible,” I said.
“It’s really terrible,” Derek agreed.
“I’ll teach her,” I said. “If she asks me again. In person.”
“She will,” Derek said.
Part Twelve: Coming Home
I flew home on February fifth.
I stayed the full eight weeks. On my last morning in Óbidos, I walked the town wall one more time at sunrise. Fernanda met me at the main gate with a bag of pastries and a hug that lasted a long time.
“You’ll come back,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Next December,” I said. “I’ve already booked it.”
Fernanda smiled.
“Good,” she said. “The book club will save your chair.”
When I came through the arrivals gate at Raleigh-Durham, Derek was waiting.
Maddie and Jack were with him, holding a poster board sign they’d made with markers. Maddie had drawn a lemon tree. Jack had drawn something that might have been a waterfall or might have been a very tall dog.
The sign said: WELCOME HOME GRANDMA DIANE THE PAINTER.
Cassandra was there too.
She stood a little behind the others, holding a paper bag. She looked nervous.
When I walked up, she held out the bag.
“I made something,” she said. “It’s probably bad.”
Inside was a pecan pie. Still lopsided. But the crust was golden, and the filling had set.
“It’s my fifth one,” she said. “I think I’m getting better.”
I looked at her. At this woman who had called my whole personality cooking and cleaning in front of a table of strangers. Who had locked herself in a bathroom on Christmas Day. Who had burned four pies before she got one right.
“Cassandra,” I said. “This looks wonderful.”
She started crying. Right there in the airport.
I hugged her. A real hug, not an air kiss.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you for the pie.”
Part Thirteen: The Next Thanksgiving
The next Thanksgiving, everything was different.
Derek called me in October to ask what I wanted to do for the holiday. Not what I’d be bringing. What I wanted.
“I’d like to sit at the table,” I said. “For the whole meal. And I’d like someone else to wash the dishes.”
“Done,” Derek said.
We did it potluck style at Derek’s house. Everyone brought one dish. Renee brought a store-bought cheese platter and apologized for it. Cassandra’s sister brought green beans. Derek made the turkey himself, after watching me do it over a video call. It was dry. Nobody cared.
I brought one pecan pie. Cassandra brought another. Hers was better than mine that year. I told her so in front of everyone, and her face turned bright pink.
During dinner, one of Cassandra’s friends noticed two framed pictures on the sideboard.
One was the old photograph from New Zealand. Me on the windswept hillside in my blue raincoat.
Next to it was a watercolor. A small white house with blue shutters and a lemon tree in the courtyard, painted in careful, slightly uneven brushstrokes. It was signed in the corner. D. Mercer, Óbidos.
“Did somebody paint that?” the friend asked.
Cassandra set down her fork.
“Diane did,” she said. “She lived in Portugal last winter. She paints now. She’s in a book club with a retired professor who runs a bookstore in a church.”
She looked at me.
“Diane,” she said. “Tell everyone about the waterfall in New Zealand. It’s an amazing story.”
The whole table turned toward me.
And this time, nobody interrupted.
After dinner, Derek and Cassandra washed the dishes together. Maddie and Jack dried. I sat in the living room with a glass of wine and listened to them arguing about who was supposed to put away the gravy boat.
Renee sat down beside me on the couch.
“Diane,” she said. “I owe you an apology too. I said you were always happiest when you were busy.”
“You did,” I said.
“I think I said it because I’ve never been busy a day in my life,” she said. “And I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing it.”
She looked toward the kitchen.
“You didn’t choose it, did you?” she said.
“Not for a long time,” I said. “But I’m choosing now.”
Before I left that night, I went into the downstairs bathroom to wash my hands.
The sign was gone. The one that said Family Is Everything.
In its place was a small framed watercolor I recognized. It was one of my practice paintings from Lúcia’s class, a lemon tree I’d given to Maddie for Christmas. She’d asked to hang it in the bathroom, where everybody would see it.
Underneath it, in Maddie’s careful ten-year-old handwriting, was a new sign on a strip of paper.
Family is everybody getting to sit down.
I stood there looking at it for a long time.
Then I dried my hands, put on my coat, and drove home to Raleigh in the dark. All along the highway, houses glowed with Christmas lights.
When I got home, I made a cup of tea and opened my laptop. I checked my flight to Lisbon. December tenth. Eight weeks. The same little house with blue shutters.
Then I opened a new folder and named it Places to Go Next.
It’s getting full.
