The crystal wineglass caught the light from the chandeliers above, and I watched my son-in-law’s father raise it high, his gold cufflinks glinting, his smile wide and practiced. 300 people were looking at him. Some were looking at me.
And I thought, now. Right now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I always do when I tell this story. My daughter used to say that about me. She’d laugh and say, “Mom, you started at the end again.”
She learned that from me, actually.
Starting at the end was how I survived. My name is Moira, and I have worked with my hands for most of my adult life. Not because I had to, at first.
Because I wanted to. My father was a finish carpenter in Fredericton, and he used to let me hold the sandpaper while he ran it along the grain of the wood, slow and careful. And he’d say, “The quality is in what you can’t see.
The underside of the drawer, the inside of the joint. The part nobody looks at. That’s where character lives.”
I think about that a lot.
The part nobody looks at. I was 31 when I had my daughter, and 32 when her father left. He didn’t leave badly.
There was no argument, no affair I knew of, no dramatic scene at the kitchen table. He just came home one evening while she was sleeping, set his keys on the counter, and said he wasn’t built for this. He said it quietly, like he was apologizing for being late.
I didn’t cry until he was out of the driveway. Then I cried for about 3 days, and then I stopped because she was awake, and she was hungry, and the world doesn’t pause. I was living in Moncton then, renting the upper half of a duplex on a street where the wind came off the bay and found every gap in the windows.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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