She had eight years to prepare. She spent them in the moment before her death: a corridor, a quality of light, the second the registry had suspended and kept. Outside, the world moved on. Each October she felt the renewal arrive the way you feel a stone dropped from far above. Eight times she thought: this is the year her daughter would call.
She had used the time. She worked through what she needed to say. At the top of the list was the summer when Lena was fifteen and Peri had stayed at the job that consumed everything because she believed, correctly, that she had no other choice. There was the move when Lena was nine. There was a birthday missed for a reason that had seemed important and now seemed like a category error. She had ordered the items by decade. She had worked out, with care, the explanations that stripped the self-justification from them, that named the costs she had asked her daughter to pay.
She was ready.
The line opened.
Lena said: do you remember the drive to the coast? The summer I was seven?
Peri thought: that isn't on the list.
She said: yes.
You let me put my hand out the window, Lena said. The whole way. I remember the air was warm and it pushed against my hand and I could feel I was going somewhere. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. I just wanted to know if you remembered it too.
Peri was quiet. She searched herself for the memory and found it: the highway, the child with her arm out the window, the specific color of the light. She had been thinking about the presentation that was due Monday. She had been running through what she would say. She had not noticed Lena's hand in the wind, or had noticed it and filed it without a name.
She said: I remember.
They talked for the hour. The list Peri had prepared was not used. Not because Lena would not have heard it. But the hour filled differently, with material that had always seemed like the wrong kind: the small and the specific, the things Peri had stored in peripheral vision while looking at the things that seemed to matter. Lena was assembling her mother from these pieces.
When the tone came, Lena said her name once, and the line closed.
Peri was in the moment before her death again. The same corridor, the same quality of light. But the weight of eight years was gone. In its place was something she did not have a name for. Not forgiveness. Not resolution. Something that would have been too small to count when she was alive.
The highway. The warm air. A hand open in the slipstream, going somewhere.