Diane had raised three children of her own, mostly alone, after Ryan’s father left when Ryan was eight.
She understood, in ways Ryan apparently never had, exactly what it meant to hold an entire household together without anyone else stepping in to share the weight.
I called her the morning after Ryan left, my voice cracking somewhere around the third sentence.
“He just left, Diane,” I said. “He packed a bag and left me alone with all three of them, and he told me I hadn’t earned a vacation.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“I’ll be there this afternoon,” she finally said. “Don’t apologize for calling me. You should have called sooner.”
Diane arrived four hours later with two suitcases of her own, one full of clothes, the other, inexplicably, full of casseroles she’d apparently made the moment she hung up the phone.
She took one look at me, standing in the doorway with spit-up on my shoulder and dark circles under my eyes, and simply pulled me into a hug that lasted considerably longer than either of us probably intended.
“You look like you haven’t slept in a week,” she said, pulling back to study my face.
“Closer to six months,” I admitted.
“How long has this been happening?” she asked once we finally sat down.
