“You’ll understand when you get there,” Patricia said.
I stared at the key for a long moment.
“She never let me visit,” I said—not quite to Patricia, and not quite to myself.
Patricia nodded slowly.
“She said you would come when the time was right.”
I drove the question home with me that night.
You’ll understand when you get there.
Those words kept circling through my mind the way a song gets stuck—shapeless, persistent.
What was there to understand? That the mold had been worse than she let on? That she’d been embarrassed by the state of the place?
I had raised her in a three-bedroom bungalow with a cracked bathroom tile for nine years before I had the money to fix it. She knew I didn’t care about imperfection.
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