“So,” Mom said, her voice quiet and strangely calm. “That is the reality of it, then.”
“That is it. The account is yours.”
“You are truly, permanently washing your hands of the payments?”
“Yes.”
She fell silent.
Instead, she said something that nearly caused me to drop my coffee mug.
“I suppose,” Mom murmured, her voice tight with an unfamiliar emotion, “that you shouldn’t have been burdened with paying for my heat in the first place.”
I sat perfectly still. “No, Mom. I shouldn’t have.”
Another long, heavy pause stretched between us. I could hear the faint sound of a new furnace blower kicking on in her background. The emergency part had obviously arrived.
“I am deeply, profoundly sorry regarding how the children were treated on Friday night,” she said.
It was a significant leap forward. It was better than the defensive posturing of the weekend. But it wasn’t the finish line.
