“I gave you a gift.”
“You confronted Claire.”
“After she insulted me.”
“She didn’t understand.”
“She understood enough to call it flea-market junk.”
“She didn’t say junk.”
June gave him a look.
Ethan exhaled.
“Fine.”
Snowflakes clung to his dark hair.
June resisted the instinct to reach up and brush them away.
“You always do this,” he said.
Her brow furrowed.
“Do what?”
“Turn things into sacrifices.”
She went very still.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The quilt. The hotel. How long you worked. My childhood stuff. It always becomes this whole emotional thing.”
June listened.
Ethan kept going because she did not interrupt.
“You give something, then suddenly everybody has to react the right way.”
June felt the cold less now.
“Have I asked you for money?”
“No.”
“Have I asked you to repay me for raising you?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Have I asked you to keep everything I ever gave you?”
“No.”
“Then explain what you mean.”
Ethan rubbed both palms down his face.
“I mean sometimes you make everything heavy.”
June looked toward the parking lot.
A young couple crossed between cars, laughing as the man tried to keep a gift bag out of the snow.
She remembered Ethan at twenty-three.
His first apartment.
A mattress on the floor.
June bringing groceries.
He had hugged her then.
“Mom, you always save me.”
At twenty-eight, when he lost his job, she paid two months of rent.
