She watched them through the window, absently folding and refolding the dish towel hanging over the sink. “You’re never going to get those grandkids you want if you keep staring at him like that.” She didn't need to turn around to know that her husband was teasing, his mouth lifting in a smile he reserved for only her.

      “It’s not right, Steven. It’s not supposed to be like this.” Her hands moved quickly, restlessly against the rough cotton. A decorative button on the towel snapped against the steel sink and she tossed the towel aside, annoyed at the sound.

      “Be like what?” He moved to his wife’s side and gestured at the couple sitting on the deck. “Those two back together again?”

      “It’s not right.” Pam’s mother turned to her husband, her eyes shining. “She shouldn’t be with him.”

      “Sarah, tell me you're not seriously about to cry. You love Roy!"

      She looked away from her husband, away from her daughter and her former finance, her eyes falling on a watercolor Pam had done months ago. One of Pam’s first forays into a new medium, the painting was sloppy, the colors bleeding into each other. It was either a scene of a waterfall or a house, Sarah didn’t have the heart to ask, but she didn’t care in only the way mothers don’t care about certain things. Sarah had hung the painting with pride, having a physical sign that her daughter was becoming. . . becoming who she could be. No longer hiding behind should’s. “It’s not right.”

      “You keep saying, but come on, it's Roy!” Steve watched Pam and Roy, looking for whatever his wife had seen that made her so unhappy. All he saw was the same old Roy. Perhaps trying a little harder, perhaps a little shinier, a little brighter, but basically the same boy that had shown up on his doorstep more than decade earlier looking to take his youngest child out on a date. Pam sat across from Roy at the picnic table, playing with her beer bottle, occasionally smiling and laughing. She looked like the same old Pammy. Seeing that, seeing that his daughter looking the same as she had always had, missing that fire that only just begun to burn, Steve felt his breath escape and his heart tighten. “Oh.” He turned so he was side by side with his wife, following her gaze to Pam’s drawing. “It’s Roy.”

      Sarah laughed softly. “Yes it is.” She crossed the kitchen and carefully pulled the painting off it's nail. “I think I’m about to earn myself a spot in the meddling mother hall of fame.”

      “Ned me to take care of Roy?” Sarah nodded and Steve scanned the house for an imaginary home repair or fix-it job. “I think it’s time to rearrange the living room furniture.” Moving as a unit with more than 20 years of practice, the Beesly’s stepped out on their patio. In a few moments, Roy was holding one end of the living room couch and Pam was trying to avoid her mother’s gaze.

      Sarah had brought out Pam’s painting, a bottle of wine and two glasses. Without speaking, she took the beer bottle from Pam and replaced it with a wine glass. She filled her daughter’s glass and then her own. Sitting down, she listened for the familiar woofing from the neighbor’s dog, the steady grinding of gears from the boy up the street working on his car. Glancing quickly at her watch, she set a deadline. She would wait ten minutes for her daughter to return to “could be” or she was going to drag her, kicking and screaming. Pam babbled something about Roy and his brother and Sarah amended her deadline. Ten minutes or until Pam used the word “should.” She sipped her wine and she waited.

      No one had told Sarah that motherhood involved so much waiting. She was fully prepared, and even enjoyed, the waiting through childhood and adolescence, through puberty and maturity. Sarah had always found pleasure in the quiet between moments. Life for Sarah Bessly truly was about the journey. She hadn’t minded waiting with her daughter for an engagement ring that took years to appear. She hadn’t really minded waiting for the date to be set and she really hadn’t minded waiting with her daughter during all of the planning. Sarah adored sitting in the florists, picking colors and displays, waiting while Pam chose the perfect flower in the perfect color. She valued the time spent wandering through bridal shops, waiting for the perfect dress to call out to her daughter. Sarah enjoyed those small moments, cherished the moments when her daughter remained her little girl for just a bit longer. She had watched her child, waiting for that moment when Pam got to feel what Sarah did with Steve. That unequivocal partnership. The waiting became a bit painful Jim's name began to replace Roy's in conversation, as Pam talked about Jim the way Sarah hald talked about Steve years before. The waiting became downright annoying when everyone in the family realized that Pam was hopeless in love with Jim, and only tolerating Roy because that was what they were supposed to do. She’d been doing it for more than 20 years, so Sarah kept waiting for her daughter.

      Then things began to change. Sarah had waited up when Pam called to share what Jim had said and her heart broke for her child. Sarah had waited for Pam to cry after telling her that Jim was transferring. She hadn't had to wait long. She had waited and listened while Pam tried out several different break-up speeches before giving Roy the real deal. The waiting stopped being enjoyable and became tedious. Then, slowly, Sarah stopped waiting. Pam was moving forward. She had her own little apartment. She was taking art classes and wearing brighter colors. Sarah watched her daughter take tiny steps toward change and it thrilled her to no end. Then, Pam left for a co-worker’s wedding the previous Saturday and returned with Roy. One look at the man she thought was gone from her daughter’s life and Sarah realized that Pam had picked up the torch. Pam was again waiting for Roy although Sarah was pretty sure Pam had no idea what she was waiting for. Sitting across from her daughter, Sarah came to the painful realization that Pam was waiting for Roy to be more like Jim . . .

      Life for Pam Bessly had never been about waiting. It had been about filling each moment with something, everything. She began drawing as a way to spill off extra energy. She played pranks on her siblings as way to generate squabbles to fill the day. She was going steady with Roy after their second date because she didn’t want to wait to see if he was the one. Sarah knew Pam didn’t reach for adventure but rather sought to pull things to her, to cover her, to fill her. No, Sarah knew, her daughter wouldn’t survive a lifetime of waiting. Sarah came to this understanding as Pam leaned excitedly across the table and blurted out, “I’m really glad we’re back together. I feel like we should be. . .”

      “Pam,” Sarah interrupted, turning to face her daughter. “My youngest child. My dear, sweet, wonderful, beautiful, Pamela.” Pam smiled nervously, already suspecting an ambush was coming. “I love you. I love you more than life.”

      Pam’s smile faltered. “But?”

      “There’s no but, my sweet Pam, my love for you is unconditional.” Sarah said and took a sip of her wine. “There’s a,” she paused, searching for the right word. “There’s an and.”

      “You love me and?”

      “And you’re an idiot.”

      “Oh.” Pam sat back in her chair, trying to read the look on her mother’s face. “Gee, Mom, thank you.”

      “My pleasure. Drink your wine, you’re going to need reinforcements.” Over her daughter’s head, Sarah saw Steven gesturing from the window and mouthed “ten more.” Steven nodded and returned to the living room.

      “Mom, if this about Roy. . .”

      Sarah acted as if she hadn’t heard her. “The night you came home and told us that you and Roy had set a date, your Dad and I were laying in bed,” Pam made a appropriate sound of embarrassment, “talking about what were going to say at the rehearsal dinner. We were trying to decide the first moment we knew our daughter was falling in love.”

      The warning bells that had alerted her to a maternal ambush were now giving Pam a migraine. She took a large sip of the wine, mildly annoyed that she liked it better than the beer, and debated walking away from her mother. Instead, she sighed and concentrated on shredding the label from the beer bottle. “High school prom, right?”

      “I remember exactly what you were wearing,” Sarah said and smiled at the memory.

      “Do I need to be here for this conversation?” Pam wondered. “Cause, really, you seem to be doing very well on your own.”

      Sarah continued, “You were wearing a blue sweater and a gray skirt. It was practically your uniform.”

      “Mom, I didn’t start wearing skirts until I was at Dunder. . .” Sarah captured her daughter’s gaze, her eyes so like her own.

      “You walked into the house from work. I was at the sink, washing strawberries for jam, and you hopped up on the counter. ‘I made a new friend,’ you said. I think you actually giggled a little.” Pam finished the rest of her wine in one gulp. “You didn’t say his name for a long time. Your Dad and I decided we probably couldn’t mention that part in our speech.” Pam only raised her eyebrow and poured herself another glass.“About a month later, you came home and couldn’t wait to tell me about some prank that you had played on Dwight. You were just about bursting.” Sarah gestured toward the house. “We were doing something, folding laundry, I think. You were bouncing around the living room, telling me the story and I looked at you, and I knew.”

      “Mom, I wasn’t in love.” Pam heard her own words and fell over her own words in her haste to clarify herself. “Wait, I was in love. I was in love with Roy. I’d been in love with Roy since I was a teenager. You can’t fall in love if you’re already in love. It doesn’t work like that.”

      Sarah just smiled and ignored most of what her daughter said. “I knew you were falling and you were falling just the way my Pammy would.” She covered her daughter’s hand with her own. “It was slow and heady and everything I wanted for you and nothing like what you had with Roy.” Sarah waited for a beat and her daughter didn’t disappoint.

      “It was the night of the Casino,” Pam said quietly.

      “As you do with all things, my quiet, sweet Pam, you took three years to fall in love and then one night, you were there. Heart, body, and soul. Once you knew he felt the same, it was all over but the celebrating.” Sarah was comforted by the fact that Pam already knew everything she was saying, but that didn’t make seeing the pain on her daughter’s face any easier. “I know you care about Roy. I know he’s an important part of your life." She paused, and just because she knew Pam would make a funny noise again added. "I'm sure sex with him is familiar and comfortable." Pam made the noise and Sarah held back a smile. "I have to wonder though, why you’re back with him. Why are you so insistent on being with someone you don’t love?”

 “I do love him,” Pam said, knowing she sounded petulant, knowing she had every right and reason to walk about from this conversation. “He’s kind and stable and we have a solid foundation. He’s funny and gentle, and he’s,” Sarah watched her child’s face break, saw the moment when the pretending became overwhelming, when the "he" shifted. “I love him so much it hurts.”

     Sarah moved across the table and wrapped her arms around her daughter. She waiting while Pam cried silently, feeling tears soak into her sweater. “When you were about seven, we went camping down in West Virginia. Do you remember that?” Sarah heard a tearful affirmation. “Remember the rapids? You and I walked down to the river to throw stones and you made a small boat out of sticks. It was this perfect little pine raft and it floated and bobbed like it had been made by a master craftsman.” The laugh that seeped out was weak and watery. “We followed it down the river for a good hundred yards when it got caught in an eddy. It was too far out to rescue, but close enough to see. You stood there, watching your raft get bashed back and forth against the rock. You would have marched right out there to save it if I'd let you. You spent that whole vacation building rafts to rescue that first raft. You lost four or five of them but you managed to get that first one out. On the last day, you got it free. It was nearly destroyed but you got it free.”
    
 She pulled back to see Pam's face. “That’s what I saw when I looked at you in the months before the wedding.” Sarah pulled the painting over and tapped the glass. “For a moment, you broke free. You stopped talking about what you thought were supposed to do and talked, and did, what you wanted to do. I don’t want to see you get sucked back into that eddy.”

      “He’s with someone new,” Pam said, tearfully. “He has someone new.”

      “Is he in love?”

      “Yes. I don’t know.” Sarah waited. “No. I don't think he is. He doesn't seem like himself around her.” Steven was back at the window, a look of growing panic on his face. Sarah nodded and held up her hand. “Five more.” Steven made a face and disappeared back into the house.

      “Promise me one thing,” Sarah asked. “Just one.”

      Pam sighed. “Fine. What?”

      “Tell the truth.”

      Pam waited for the rest, searching her mother’s face. When it became clear that Sarah was finished, Pam furrowed her brow. “That’s it?”
 
      “How have you been doing on that so far? Does Jim know how you feel?" Instead of forcing Pam to answer, Sarah picked up her wine glass by the stem, motioning for Pam to do the same. “It may be the hardest thing you ever do, Pam. But I want to you start telling the truth, to start sticking up for yourself. Before you get so smashed against those rocks that I can’t recognize my own baby any more.”

      A wave of sadness, of pain, and of fear crashed over Pam with such intensity, she felt her heart stop. For one moment, she felt as if she was going to dissolve into giant, heaving sobs that would reduce her to the capacity of child. Before it could overtake her, it passed. Leaving her weak and drained but still standing. She took a deep, warbling breath and touched her glass to her mother’s. “To the truth.”
     
___________________________

      That evening, Sarah climbed into bed next to already sleeping Steven. He snuffled and rolled over. “Is Pammy okay?”

      “She’s fine,” Sarah said, putting on her reading glasses and finding her place in her bedside novel. “I don’t think we should call her Pammy any more, though.”

      Steven nodded, “Fine. Is she going to dump Roy again?”

      Sarah put down her book and rested her hand on Steven’s arm. “I don’t know. I think she’s going to keep trying, but on her terms. I made her promise to stand up for herself.”

      Steven made a sound that was half-snort, half-laugh. “Pammy? Being assertive?”

      “I think so,” Sarah nodded and opened her book up. “and I'm pretty sure we're not going to have to wait too long.”