Afraid of losing me.
“Come here,” I said.
He moved closer.
I took his hand.
No keys.
No deed.
No money.
No restitution check.
Just my son’s hand.
“I loved you before you were sorry,” I told him.
His face collapsed.
Then I added:
“And I loved myself enough to make you become sorry.”
He laughed through his tears.
“Mom.”
That was enough.
When I think about that canceled flight now, I do not think of bad luck.
I think of interruption.
A mechanical problem kept an airplane on the ground.
That sent me home.
That placed me in my driveway at exactly the moment my son’s metal tool struck the porch.
Some people would call that fate.
Maybe it was.
I prefer to think of it as information arriving at the moment I finally needed it.
Because the most important thing I recovered that day was not James’s lamp.
