10 min read · 1,858 words
How long can I keep calling a blank page “unfinished” before I admit I’m the one who doesn’t want to read it?
I’ve been asking myself that since my daughter, Nina, sat across from me at my kitchen table and left her pages empty. We were making a scrapbook for my two grandkids after my wife, Ruth, died. I’d filled my pages with the funny stories, the birthday cakes, the trips to the coast. Nina’s pages were blank except for the dates.
At first I figured she hadn’t gotten around to it. I said that because it was easier than asking why.
Ruth had been gone eight months. Nina was forty-one, with two kids of her own and a job that kept her answering email after dinner. I was sixty-nine and retired from the county assessor’s office, where I’d spent thirty years putting things in boxes and labeling them. I thought a scrapbook might help the kids remember their grandmother as more than a name on a headstone.
I hadn’t asked Nina what she thought the book was for.
The first time I noticed the blank pages, I was at her house dropping off the album. Her son had left a plastic dinosaur in my car, and I’d brought it back. Nina had the book open on the counter, with a stack of photos beside it.
“You can take your time,” I said.
“I know.”
She slid the photos into a drawer. Not roughly. Just out of sight.
I told myself she was tired. I’ve always been good at supplying a reason that lets me avoid the harder one.
Ruth could be generous in a way people remembered. She brought soup when neighbors were sick. She knew which grandchild liked the corner piece of cake. She also had a way of turning sharp without warning. A question about school could become a lecture about laziness. A small mistake could get brought up again months later, at dinner, in front of everybody.
I knew that. I just didn’t call it what it was.
When Nina was growing up, I often stepped in after the worst of it and said, “Your mother’s had a long day.” Or, “You know she loves you.” I said those things because I did believe Ruth loved her. I also wanted the house to settle down so we could eat.
That’s not a very good reason. It’s just the one I had.
For years, I treated the next morning like a reset button. Ruth would put toast on Nina’s plate, Nina would say thank you, and I’d decide we were all fine. I liked the sound of normal. It made my job easier.
Nina and Ruth had one year when they barely spoke. Nina was twenty-three, working at a dental office in Bakersfield and renting a little apartment with a friend. I remember the year because I kept the phone bill in a drawer for some reason. I don’t remember what month the silence started. I remember Ruth sitting at the counter, looking at the phone when it rang.
She’d say, “Is that her?”
I’d check.
If it was Nina, I’d hand over the phone. If it wasn’t, Ruth would ask who called. I thought I was helping. I didn’t tell Nina that her mother wanted to talk. I didn’t tell Ruth that Nina had asked me not to pass messages.
I told myself I was staying out of it.
After Nina moved home, Ruth and she got closer again, though never in a simple way. They could spend a whole afternoon making jam and then argue over one sentence in the car. I watched them find a rhythm and called that healing. I wanted the story to have a good ending, so I stopped checking what was still sore.
That’s why I filled my scrapbook pages the way I did.
I wrote about Ruth making Nina’s favorite cinnamon rolls before her high school graduation. I put in a picture of them laughing at the beach, both of them with windblown hair and sand on their feet. I wrote that Ruth could make a stranger feel like family.
All true.
I didn’t write about the times Nina called me from her apartment and asked if she was a bad daughter. I didn’t write what I’d said back. Usually it was some version of, “Just give her a little time.”
When Nina came over to work on the book, she sat beside me and turned through my pages. She took her time. I watched her fingers pause at the beach photo.
“You got the year wrong,” she said.
I leaned closer. “Did I?”
“It was the summer after I moved back.”
I changed the caption. I was glad she’d corrected me, which is a small thing to be glad about. It meant she was looking.
Then she turned to her own pages. There was one photo of her and Ruth at a school concert, both dressed up, Ruth’s hand resting on Nina’s shoulder. Nina looked at it for a while.
I said, “You could write something about that night.”
“I don’t know what to write.”
“You were both happy.”
“We were happy that night.”
I wanted to say that was enough. I could feel the words coming up, the same old words I’d used for years: focus on the good, don’t make the kids carry this, she did her best.
Instead I asked, “Is there something you don’t want in the book?”
Nina closed it. The cover made a soft thump against the table.
“I don’t know how to write about a mother who could be loving one day and cruel the next.”
I started to tell her that “cruel” was a strong word. I even opened my mouth. Then I remembered Ruth telling Nina she was selfish for wanting to move out, and Nina sitting in my car afterward with her coat still on, not crying, just staring at the dashboard.
I’d driven her to her apartment and said, “She didn’t mean it like that.”
I can’t say for sure what Ruth meant. I know what Nina heard.
“I loved her,” Nina said. “I’m still hurt by her.”
I nodded. I’m not claiming I did that perfectly. I wanted to explain Ruth. I wanted to say she had a hard childhood, that she got scared when Nina pulled away, that she wasn’t always good at saying what she meant. All of it might have been true. None of it would have changed what Nina was telling me.
So I said, “The pages can hold both.”
Nina looked at me. “Can they?”
I said they could. I meant it, though it took me a while to stop wanting the book to be tidy.
We started with the facts. Nina wrote that Ruth showed up for her school concerts, even when she worked late. Then she wrote that Ruth could make her feel small with one comment. She stopped after that and tapped the pen twice against the paper.
I wanted to fill the silence. I didn’t.
The next week, Nina brought the scrapbook back to my house. She’d added a few lines to the page about the concert. She’d also left the next page blank. I noticed it, but kept my mouth shut.
That was progress, apparently. Not much, but mine.
We made coffee and went through old photos. One was of Nina at twenty-three, holding a cardboard box in the parking lot of her first apartment. Ruth wasn’t in the picture. I had taken it because Nina wanted proof she’d moved in, or maybe because I was proud of her. I don’t remember which.
Nina put the photo beside the blank page.
“I used to think she’d call first,” she said.
I knew what she meant. During that year, Nina had waited for Ruth to apologize. Ruth waited for Nina to call. I carried messages when it suited me, but I never told either of them the full truth about the other. I thought that way I was keeping the door open.
Really, I was trying not to be the person who made either of them mad.
Nina asked what I remembered about that year. I said I remembered the phone bill, and Ruth asking if it was her. Nina said she remembered calling me once and asking if her mother had said anything.
I did remember that call. I had been standing in the garage with a box of old tax forms.
“What did I say?” I asked.
“You said she was waiting for me to apologize.”
I looked down at the table. I’d said that because Ruth told me Nina needed to take responsibility. But Nina had told me Ruth was the one who’d said she was selfish and ungrateful. I never told Ruth that Nina had been waiting for an apology, too. I thought saying it would start another fight.
“I shouldn’t have told you that,” I said.
“No,” Nina said. “You shouldn’t have.”
She didn’t raise her voice. That made it worse, in a way. There was no big scene to push against. Just the old thing, sitting there between the coffee cups.
I told her I’d been afraid of making it worse. She said she knew. Then she asked if I understood that my silence had made it worse anyway.
I said I did.
It took me a few days to decide what to write. I kept starting with Ruth’s good qualities, as if I could earn my way to the truth by listing them first. Finally, I opened the scrapbook to a page Nina had left for me and wrote one sentence.
I didn’t write that Ruth was a bad mother. She wasn’t only that. I didn’t write that Nina should forgive her. That wasn’t mine to decide.
I wrote that when Nina and Ruth stopped speaking, I told Nina to apologize because I was too afraid to ask Ruth to.
Nina read it at my kitchen table. Her finger rested under the last word.
“You can leave that in,” she said.
So I did. Nina wrote her own page about the year, though she didn’t fill the whole thing. The book now has the beach picture, the concert photo, the cinnamon rolls, and a page that says Nina loved her mother and was hurt by her. The grandkids can read it when they’re older, or not. That part is theirs.
My sentence is still there beside hers.
The page isn’t blank anymore.