Folding the Towels Wrong

“She didn’t cry when he walked out. She just kept folding the towels wrong.”

My father left on a Tuesday. I was driving back from a work conference that Monday, my mother had called me twice, which she never does. My mother treats phone calls like someone is dying. I let both go to voicemail. I figured it was about a plumber.

This was 2019. He was fifty-three. She was fifty-one. Twenty-eight years of marriage. A mortgage in a suburb I will not name, a Sub-Zero fridge they’d argued about all winter before purchasing, and an Akita named Buster who had no idea the world was ending.

What I remember most, more than the screaming or my sister sobbing on the phone until she couldn’t breathe, was the silence in the kitchen the morning he didn’t come home. My mother stood at the island with her back to me, doing what she’d done every morning for twenty-eight years: folding dish towels into thirds. She folded them wrong. Not the way she’d shown me when I was nine, the precise hospital-corner fold she learned from her own mother. A sloppy accordion, like she had temporarily forgotten the choreography of her own hands. I thought: this is what a woman looks like when she doesn’t cry. I should not have been so sure about that.

She didn’t tell me about the other woman for months. She didn’t have to. I was already noticing. He’d stopped asking about my sister’s promotion. Picked me up from the airport at Thanksgiving with a weird new cologne on his collar. Left a credit card statement on the counter I glimpsed, charges from a wine bar in a part of town he had never in his life had a reason to visit.

When she finally told me, sitting on her bed in a cardigan, looking like a professor being asked to explain something obvious, she said: “He says she makes him feel young. I guess I’m supposed to be happy for him.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t, years later, though the years have blurred in a way I find embarrassing.

He married the other woman within the year. Younger than me by four years, which is the kind of detail you only learn because your father cannot shut up about it during the small window when he still pretends to be proud. They bought a Scottsdale condo. She had a TikTok. She called him, in my hearing, Jeffie. He let her. He let her call him Jeffie. He let her. I’d like to say this disgusted me. Honestly I just felt tired. The way you feel watching someone embarrass themselves and you can’t look away.

My mother cried.

She cried a lot. She cried in the bathtub, the cold bathtub water she wouldn’t notice. She cried in her car at the stop sign on the corner of Maple and Ninth, a stop sign I have now driven through a hundred times thinking of her sitting there. She cried in her closet on the floor, with Buster pressed against her thigh, the dog my father always joked about because Buster loved her more than him. Except suddenly it wasn’t a joke. There was a stretch of months, maybe four, maybe five, where I genuinely did not know if she was going to come out the other side of fifty-two. Not suicidal exactly. More like the woman she’d built her whole adult architecture around had just up and vanished on her, and what’s left is a rainy Tuesday that never quite ends.

I would sit on her couch and she would talk and I’d watch a piece of fuzz on the carpet, just this one stubborn piece of fuzz, and I’d think: I cannot make her better, I cannot even make her tea right now, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.

I drove over every evening for a while. Brought soup no one ate. Texted her things I didn’t believe at two in the afternoon with my boss in the next room.

That first year, things about my mother kept surfacing that I still don’t entirely trust:

She had stopped sleeping in their bed early on, because the bed smelled like him and she would rather bruise her hip on the guest room mattress than lie in his absence.

She taught herself to cook different food almost overnight, because the kitchen had been his domain in a way none of us had ever said out loud, and she wouldn’t eat one more thing involving his pans.

She kept a single pair of his old boxer shorts in the back of her drawer for something like six months. She told me one night. I made a sound that was supposed to be sympathetic and came out wrong. We both just sat there. Buster snored in the background. I noticed a stain on the ceiling I’d never seen before, a brownish thing in the shape of a country I couldn’t name.

I am not going to tell you she handled this with grace. She didn’t emerge stronger or whatever word Instagram uses for that kind of carpet burn. She handled it the way you handle a burn that’s still warm. Badly, slowly. You keep poking at it.

He called. Last February, or maybe the February before. I can’t keep his comebacks straight. Sober. Genuine. Begging. Fifty-six, broke, his Scottsdale condo in pre-foreclosure, his young wife already half-out-the-door with someone from a cycling studio or maybe CrossFit. He told me different things at different times. He wanted my mother back. The voice on the voicemail, because she played it for me since she was past protecting me from it, sounded like a dog left at the shelter. It’s a thing I’ve said about him before and it keeps being true and I hate that it keeps being true.

My mother said no.

I was surprised by how flatly she said it. No hesitation. No “let me think about it.” No weeping about old times. Just, very softly, almost annoyed in tone, the way you talk to a kid who’s asking for a cookie before dinner: “Jeff. I can’t do this. I’m not going to be the thing you come back to when it gets bad. I did that once.”

(He was still going by Jeffie with the other woman. I think about that a lot. My mother thinking about that is, I think, the only thing that got her through some of those nights. She would not become the kind of woman who said Jeffie. She would rather have died first. I watched her.)

I told her I was proud of her. I also know this is the part I can’t say to her face: I don’t know what her no was made of.

Some of it was dignity, I think. Some of it was three years of therapy and Pilates and three glasses of Malbec on Fridays while my sister and I pretended not to notice. Maybe some of it was a bill her body had finally presented. I come back to exhaustion a lot. I think it was mostly exhaustion.

I have a friend whose mother took her father back the year he came crawling home, and she admires her for it. Forgiveness, my friend calls it. She says you don’t throw out a whole house over one rotten beam. I respect this. I also want to scream into a pillow about it, and I have, more than once, in my car, in parking lots, with the engine running so the heater works.

I sat in my car after she played the voicemail and felt my chest do this terrible thing where it tried to be generous to a man who had smashed my mother’s kitchen table the spring he left. I wanted to comfort him. I didn’t want to want that. I sat there a long time, watching a stranger load groceries into the back of a Subaru in the next parking space over, and I thought: I am not the daughter I thought I was.

That my body still reaches for his comfort, even now, even knowing what he did. That’s the work I’m doing this decade. Badly. In the way you do anything that requires you to be a different person than the one you were raised to be.

He’s on a futon in his sister’s guest room in a suburb I will not name. The young wife took his money or is in negotiations. None of it is satisfying in the way I was told it would be. I guess that’s what I got instead.

On a Sunday in March, or maybe February, the months running together, I called my mother and asked her the question I had been hiding from myself for years.

“Mom. Did you love him when he left.”

A long pause. Buster snoring in the background. She had started cooking with garlic again, which was something. The pan on the stove hadn’t blackened yet. I heard a dog two houses down start barking at nothing.

She said: “I loved him the way you love a house you got the deed to. He was part of my record. He wasn’t romantic anymore. He was just there, the way the kitchen window is there. And I didn’t notice how much I needed a window until someone bricked it up.”

I wrote it down. I’m writing it down again.

I don’t know if she’s better off without him. I don’t know if a woman with a smaller window that leaks and a dog named Buster II, for reasons I haven’t asked, is on balance happier than one who had no window for years and got used to it. I keep thinking I’ll figure it out and then I don’t, and then I think maybe I’m not supposed to.

My father calls me on Father’s Day. I pick up. I don’t pick up. I pick up.

I have never once said to my mother, please take him back. I have also never once said to my father, you were right to leave.

What I have said, over and over, to both of them, is: I am on your side.

The thing I can’t say, even to a page I’m pretending no one will see, is that I don’t think I’m on anyone’s side. I think I’m on the side of the daughter who was nine and being taught a hospital-corner fold, and that daughter is not in this marriage, and never was, and I keep trying to locate her and she keeps not being available, and the kitchen where I learned the fold is gone. Sold. Someone else folds towels in it now. I don’t know how they fold them.

I’m in the kitchen. I’m folding towels wrong, probably, into some shape I haven’t been taught. The radio’s on low. There’s a streak of something on the counter I’ve been meaning to wipe since Thanksgiving. Nobody’s said anything in a while. The towels will sit there like that until somebody notices.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.