For a refresher, you can read Part 5 HERE.
I got up to make the tea this time.
It felt like the natural thing to do; Jeff had been doing the quiet work of this afternoon from the moment I arrived …. the refilling, the listening, the steady unhurried presence of him …. and I wanted to give something back, even if it was only this. I knew where he kept things by now. The kettle. The mugs on the second shelf. The tea in the wooden box near the window that looked out on the small backyard. The light was starting to go gold and lateral, the way it does in late afternoon when the day is thinking about becoming evening.
I heard him behind me before I felt him …. or maybe I felt him first, the warmth of him, and then heard the slight shift of his weight on the kitchen floor. He put his arms around me from behind, loosely, no demand in it, just a kind of quiet encircling, the way you might put your arms around someone to let them know you were there. Not going anywhere.
I stood still for a moment with my hands on the counter.
Then I turned around.
I’m not sure which of us moved first after that. It doesn’t matter. We kissed the way you kiss someone when it feels less like a beginning than a recognition …. warm and unhurried, a welcome, a small and serious “yes”. When we stepped back from each other we were both smiling, though neither of us said anything about it. There wasn’t anything to say. The kettle began to build toward its whistle and I turned back to finish making the tea; Jeff got the mugs down from the shelf, and we moved around each other in the small kitchen the way people do when something has shifted between them and they are both content to let it settle before they name it.
We brought our cups back to the table.
The photograph of my father was still there, face up. I turned it face down without thinking …. gently, not dismissively, just giving us the room.
“Can I ask you something?” Jeff said.
“You’ve been asking me things all afternoon,” I said. “Don’t stop now.”
He smiled at that. “Your mother …. what’s her name?”
“Patricia. My dad was Harry.”
He sat for a minute with that new information. “You said your mother found the box after your father passed and put it away. You’re sure she never opened it?”
“It wasn’t addressed to her,” I said, the same thing I’d said before. My automatic answer, the one I kept on hand.
But something moved, the way things move when you say a true thing and then hear it back and realize it was only partly true.
“She wouldn’t have,” I said. “That wasn’t how she operated. There were lines she didn’t cross.”
Jeff was quiet. Not pushing. Just present.
“She had very defined ideas about what was right,” I said slowly. “About how things should be done. What was proper.” I turned my mug in my hands. “It was something she wore. Like a coat she never took off.”
“That sounds exhausting,” Jeff said. “For her, I mean.”
I looked at him. “I never thought of it that way,” I said. “I always thought it was exhausting for everyone around her.”
But even as I said it, something was loosening at the back of my mind, some knot that had been there so long I’d stopped noticing it. Patricia Gardner and her impenetrable sense of propriety. Who never said more than she had to on the phone. Who had packed up that house with a speed and efficiency that in retrospect seemed more like relief than grief.
“She didn’t look in the box,” I said again. But I was less sure now. And beneath the uncertainty something else was surfacing, something older. Not a thought exactly …. more like a weather pattern …. a particular quality of summer light and the smell of salt air and the sound of my mother’s voice saying a name that wasn’t mine.
“Becca,” Jeff said.
“Sorry.” I came back to the moment, to the kitchen and the hot tea, to Jeff’s face across the table. “I was somewhere else for a second.”
“Somewhere worth going?”
“I don’t know yet.” I set my mug down. “You asked about my mother. The honest answer is that I thought I knew everything about how she operated. Now I’m not certain I knew as much as I thought.”
He waited.
“She and my father,” I said carefully. “It wasn’t a happy marriage. I understood that by the time I was old enough to understand anything. They were civil to each other. They were present. But there was something between them that had gone cold a long time before I was aware enough to notice.”
“Did you ever ask him about it? Or her?”
“I asked him once,” I said. “I was maybe sixteen. He looked at me for a long time and then he said, “we made mistakes, Becca, and we paid for them”. And then he changed the subject. I never asked again.”
The gold light in the backyard had deepened. Somewhere on the street outside a child called out to another child and then went quiet.
We made mistakes and we paid for them.
I had always assumed that was about the two of them. Their marriage, their distances, the separate silences they maintained under the same roof. But now, with the letters on the table between us and Helen Matthews living in my childhood home and something I couldn’t yet name pressing up through the floor of an old memory …. a summer cottage, my mother’s rigid back, a small boy with sandy feet running ahead of me down a path toward the water…..
I picked up my mug. Put it down again.
“Jeff,” I said. “Did you ever have a memory you didn’t know you had?”
He thought about that seriously, the way he thought about everything. “You mean one that was there the whole time but you couldn’t get to it?”
“One that was there the whole time,” I said, “but you didn’t know what it was.”
He looked at me. Something in his face said he understood that we had just moved from one kind of conversation to another.
“Tell me,” he said.
And the afternoon held still, and waited, and I tried to find the beginning of something I wasn’t sure I was ready to remember.
NAR©2026
End of Part 6. You can read Part 5 HERE.
This is “Memories” by Maroon 5
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thank you for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 
Way good Nancy 😀
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