At twelve fifteen the next day, Ethan and I were sitting beside the children’s pool with two melting cups of ice cream and no sign of his parents. The couples massage that was supposed to end before lunch had somehow expanded into lunch itself. Emily texted at eleven fifty-eight to say they had met another couple at the spa and were eating together. She added three heart emojis, apologized, and promised to return shortly. By then I had already watched the coastal tour bus depart without me.
Ethan licked chocolate from his thumb and said, “Mom says Grandma vacations are the best.”
I smiled. “Does she?”
“Because you always play with me.”
There was no accusation in it. He was seven. To him, availability and love were nearly the same thing.
“What do you usually do when your mom and dad go somewhere without you?”
He shrugged.
“Sometimes I stay with Mrs. Hart. Sometimes a sitter comes.”
The answer caught my attention only briefly.
“Who’s Mrs. Hart?”
“Our neighbor. She has a mean cat.”
I laughed, and the thought slipped away.
Emily and Brian returned after two. Their massage had been wonderful. Lunch had been wonderful. The people they met were apparently wonderful too. Emily showed me photographs on her phone: a terrace shaded by palms, two brightly colored drinks, Brian leaning against a railing with the ocean behind him.
“You should go there tomorrow,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Go where?”
“That restaurant.”
“With whom?”
The question came out more sharply than I intended.
Her smile hesitated.
“With us, obviously. We’ll figure something out.”
Something.
That word began to appear often during the next two days.
We’ll figure something out.
We’ll trade off later.
Tomorrow will be easier.
You don’t mind, do you?
I had spent most of my life being proud of the fact that my daughter could depend on me. When Emily was an infant, Julian worked double shifts at a manufacturing plant while I stayed home. When she started school, I volunteered for everything. When she moved into her first apartment, I stocked her kitchen. When she married Brian, we helped with the down payment on their house. After Ethan was born, I became the person they called whenever daycare closed, when somebody had a fever, when a work meeting ran late.
Julian sometimes said I made myself too available.
“She needs us,” I would answer.
“She needs to know we’re there,” he would say. “That’s different from teaching her that we always will be.”
At the time, I thought he was being hard on her.
After he died, Emily became more attentive. She called almost every day. She brought groceries. She helped me sort insurance paperwork. She sat beside me during the first Christmas without him and quietly removed Julian’s stocking when she saw I could not bear looking at it.
Those memories mattered. They made each new request easier to excuse.
On the third morning, I woke to a message saying Ethan had asked to have breakfast with Nana.
Twenty minutes later, he knocked on my door by himself.
I opened it in alarm.
“Where are your parents?”
“In their room.”
“Did they send you here alone?”
He pointed across the corridor. Their door was perhaps fifteen feet away.
“Mom said you were awake.”
Of course I was awake. Emily could see when I had read messages.
I guided him inside.
“Did you eat?”
He shook his head.
I called Emily.
She answered after several rings, her voice thick with sleep.
“Morning, Mom.”
“Ethan is in my room.”
“I know. He was dying to see you.”
“He hasn’t had breakfast.”
“Oh. Can you take him down? Brian and I were out late, and he’s still asleep.”
I looked through the open balcony doors. Another clear morning. My itinerary showed a botanical walking tour at nine thirty.
“Emily, I have something scheduled.”
“It’s only breakfast.”
“Yesterday was supposed to be only until lunch.”
A pause.
“You’re upset.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You sound upset.”
There it was—the familiar shift that somehow made my reaction the problem instead of the circumstance causing it.
“I came here expecting to spend time with all of you,” I said carefully.
“And you are.”
“I’ve spent most of the trip with Ethan.”
“He loves being with you.”
“I love being with him too.”
“Then I don’t understand what the problem is.”
I closed my eyes.
Behind me, Ethan had found the television remote and was sitting cross-legged on the carpet.
I lowered my voice.
“The problem is I also made plans.”
“Okay. God, Mom, I’m sorry. Take him to breakfast. We’ll come get him afterward.”
“When?”
“An hour.”
She arrived one hour and forty minutes later.
The botanical tour had already left.
Emily came to the restaurant wearing a white cover-up over her swimsuit and carrying a straw hat large enough to shade three people.
“Thank you,” she said, kissing me. “Seriously.”
Brian appeared several minutes later.
“You ready?” he asked her.
I set down my coffee.
“Ready for what?”
They both looked at me.
Emily recovered first.
“We were thinking of going snorkeling.”
I stared at her.
“You just came to get Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re going snorkeling.”
Brian pulled out a chair. “We can take him.”
Ethan brightened.
“Really?”
Brian hesitated.
Emily rubbed her forehead.
“The boat might not be great for him.”
“I like boats,” Ethan said.
“It’s a long trip, honey.”
“I don’t get sick.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I knew what was coming before she turned toward me.
“Mom, would you mind keeping him until we get back?”
I looked at my grandson.
He was no longer smiling.
That decided it.
“Go,” I said.
Emily exhaled. “Thank you.”
They left so quickly that I wondered whether they had ever seriously considered taking him.
That afternoon, Ethan and I built a sandcastle. We dug a channel to the water and watched every third or fourth wave destroy part of it. He laughed each time and rebuilt the wall with both hands.
I tried to enjoy myself.
Sometimes I succeeded.
But every time I looked farther down the beach, I saw couples walking together. Friends carrying towels. Older women reading under umbrellas. A gray-haired man rubbed sunscreen across his wife’s shoulders, and the ordinary tenderness of the gesture struck me so unexpectedly that I turned away.
Julian would have brought a ridiculous folding hat.
He would have insisted on finding the cheapest coffee within walking distance of the resort despite having prepaid for breakfast.
He would have complained that hotel pillows were designed by people with no necks.
Grief was like that. It did not always arrive with anniversaries or photographs. Sometimes it hid inside a stranger squeezing sunscreen onto his palm.
“Grandma?”
I blinked.
Ethan was watching me.
“Are you sad?”
“A little.”
“About Grandpa?”
“Yes.”
He thought about that.
“Mom says this vacation is to make you not sad anymore.”
I stared at him.
“She said that?”
He nodded, already scooping sand again.
“She said you were lonely.”
The word embarrassed me more than it should have.
I had been lonely. But loneliness felt private, something that belonged behind closed doors with the unwashed coffee cup I sometimes left on Julian’s side of the breakfast table because moving it made his absence more official.
Emily had apparently discussed it casually enough for Ethan to repeat it.
That evening she posted photographs online.
I discovered them while Ethan showered in my bathroom.
The first showed Emily and me in the hotel lobby on arrival day, both smiling. The caption said she was giving her mother the restful week she deserved.
The second showed me and Ethan on the beach.
Three friends had commented beneath it.
You’re such a wonderful daughter.
What a beautiful gift for your mom.
She must be so grateful to have you.
I stared at those words longer than I want to admit.
In the photograph, Ethan and I looked happy. We had been happy for that exact moment. What the picture did not show was the abandoned coastal tour ticket on my desk. It did not show the missed botanical walk. It did not show my untouched blue dress or the room-service tray outside my door.
I almost commented.
I did not know what I would say.
Actually, she left her son with me while she went snorkeling?
It sounded petty even inside my own head.
So I put the phone down.
Brian and Emily returned close to eight.
“We’re all having dinner together tomorrow,” Emily announced.
“All of us?”
“All of us.”
“With Ethan?”
She laughed.
“Yes, Mom. With our own child.”
The joke made Brian smile.
I did not.
Emily noticed.
“Come on. I’m teasing.”
“I know.”
She studied me for a moment.
“You really are upset.”
“I’m tired.”
“Then we’ll take Ethan.”
That should not have sounded like an extraordinary offer.
Yet it did.
I packed his things and handed her his small backpack.
At the door, she hugged me.
“Tomorrow will be different.”
After she left, I ordered dinner alone.
The restaurant downstairs was crowded, and I could not make myself sit at a table surrounded by families, so I carried a plate back upstairs. I ate beside the balcony door with the television off.
It was the third dinner of the trip I had eaten without another adult.
I found Julian’s photograph on my phone and looked at it while chewing.
In the picture, he was standing in our kitchen holding a wooden spoon like a microphone. I remembered taking it. He had been singing badly on purpose.
“You would tell me to say something,” I whispered.
And I knew exactly what he would have said in return.
Then say something.
I placed the phone facedown.
Tomorrow, I decided.
If Emily asked me to change another plan, I would refuse.
It seemed simple.
At the time, I still believed the only problem was that my daughter had become careless with my time.
Click Here to continue read next: PART3: By the Sixth Day I Had Stopped Believing in Coincidences, but I Still Couldn’t Imagine How Carefully the Week Had Been Arranged
My Daughter Called It a Gift, but Before Our Suitcases Were Unpacked I Was Already Wondering Who the Vacation Was Really For
Part 2 of 12
