But something had changed.
At Thanksgiving, when my father said something quietly at the end of the table, a story about the ice storm of ’07 that nobody had heard, Cindy did something I’d never seen her do.
She stopped talking.
“Leon, say that again?” she said. “I didn’t catch it.”
Dad looked surprised. Then he told the story again, louder, to the whole table. Cindy listened all the way through without interrupting once.
For Cindy, that’s practically a miracle.
On her sixtieth birthday in March, there was no cruise. Josh and I took her to dinner at a steakhouse in Springfield and gave her a card with a framed photo inside: the whole family on Uncle Gene’s dock at the reunion two summers before, everyone squinting into the sun, Dad standing at the end in his straw hat.
She looked at that picture for a long time. Then she said quietly, “I’ll keep my hands to myself on that dock from now on.”
“Good,” Josh said.
She laughed. But it wasn’t the dock laugh. It was softer.
