Any reservations that Kate Nelson had about her daughter and herself crumbled when Kerry made this simple demand of her. She was crying, reaching to put her arms around the woman who she now knew would soon be her daughter-in-law. Someone else who understood how perfect her Suzanne was.
She clung to Kerry, weeping, for five minutes before being able to say how she loved Suzanne. And after all of that time, and the years that came before it, all she could manage was “She’s my baby and I need to be her mother again. Whatever I have to do, I need to be her mother again” and Kerry said, “well just let me give her a call and find out what that is” and she got up and headed outside and after stunning her fiancée returned to tell her soon-to-be mother-in-law simply that “the first thing you have to do is to come with me to meet Suzanne’s train in forty-five minutes.”
Kate breathed.
Kerry had cut to the chase with Suze. “Babe, you’re mother’s in the house in Tuckahoe. I’ll give you the details later. Right now, I need to know whether you are ready to see her. I only found out when Mom called me a little over an hour ago. They met with her last night and again this morning after contacting her a few days ago.” She explained that she would give Suze details later but that she and her Mom agreed that it could work if Suzanne wanted it to and that she and her Mom would support her in any decision she made and would be with her no matter what. She emphasized that the decision was Suze’s to make.
Kerry then called her Mom and Mary to give them updates, particularly that Kerry had decided Kate had said enough to justify asking Suze to come home to at least meet with her, and both Eileen and Mary said that they were relieved and hopeful.
And after getting the okay from her boss, Suze was on the next train.
Catching Up
I was midway through a report on Brexit when Kerry called. But first a bit of an explanation. I haven’t written since I became engaged to Kerry back in early November.
I never went back to law school. I was happy as a vice president at Trallis Corp. After first year, I started as a paralegal at Sullivan & Wilson. I was there for over nine months when on a Tuesday afternoon in early March, Carol Wright, a partner, asked me to come to her office. The firm, of course, knew my law-school situation, but I had arranged a loan package and was set to enroll when the Fall term began.
When I got to her office, she and Tom Sullivan told me that a major client, Trallis, for which I had done work on a major litigation in which it was a defendant, “wants to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Trallis,” Carol said, “isn’t sure what exactly it wants you for but Bob Elroy said Trallis definitely wants you.”
Tom continued: “Suzanne. Bob would like you to go over there this Friday—we’re happy to have you take the day off—and meet with him and a few other folks and especially Marc Diamond, the CEO, to see if they can come up with something that’ll make you and them happy. He said he doesn’t want to pressure you but that Trallis wants the chance to make its pitch.”
And on Friday Trallis made its pitch and after talking about with Mary and Betty and especially Kerry, I took a job there. My title is vice president of development. It amounts to people coming to me from all divisions of the Company to run things past me. It is almost crazy that I get paid for doing it, and the pay is good and my stock options are accumulating.
All of which explains why I never went back to school and why I was in my Trallis office when Kerry called.
The Beginning of the Beginning: Thursday, 2 p. m.
After my usual, “Hey, babe,” she dropped the bomb that she was sitting with my mother at the house. Before I could react, she said that she just found out, that Mom—Kerry and I both called her Mom “Mom”—did something to bring this about, that she would explain it all later, and that while whatever happened next was entirely up to me, she and Mom thought it a good idea for me to meet her.
“If that’s what you think I should—”
“Suze, yeah, we both think that but whatever you do is okay by us. We just think you should, not that you have to. I met with her. I sat with her. I yelled at her. I thanked her for driving you out of California into my arms.”
“You didn’t.”
“No, I did not put it like that. Then I told her if she wanted to see you again, and I hope you are okay with me acting like a gatekeeper on this, that if she wanted to see you, she had to tell me why.
“She hugged me for like five minutes. She was crying and then said Mom forced her to look into herself and decide whether her faith was such as to make her sacrifice her daughter, like Abraham…Yes, Old Testament stuff. She sat in a church near NYU for like an hour and just thought. I don’t think it’s a put-up job.”
I knew I had to do it. I grabbed the report I was reading and shoved it into my backpack and went into Marc Diamond’s office and said I needed to leave for a family emergency. He waved me away with “Go.” I grabbed a cab for Grand Central and when I got to my train I texted Kerry with my arrival time, I’d be in the last car.