I still have the truck, the Ford I kept running through twenty years of first-of-the-month transfers, which now retains its money rather than moving it to an address where it was not acknowledged. I have my sister Rosa, who calls on Sundays and says what she thinks without first consulting what you want to hear, which is the most valuable quality in any person and the most reliable predictor of whether they will still be in your life when the circumstances change. And I have Michael.
Not the version of Michael who was afraid of his own reflection and needed someone else to fund the image he wanted to project. The version who shows up in muddy work boots and says what he means and is learning, slowly and at considerable personal cost, that a man’s worth is not the address he lives at or the car in his driveway but the capacity to stand on the ground without someone else providing the floor. Maria knew this.
She had always known it. She put it differently: she said you cannot love someone into becoming something they have not decided to be yet. You can only make sure that when they decide, you are still there.
I am still here. That turned out to be worth more than everything else I spent.
