Page 92 of Slots & Sticks
“I hope the person you chose is as good to you as your father has been to me,” Kingsley continues, voice steady. “But honey—” she pauses, looks up again—“I hope you are good to you. Motherhood scared me half to death. I spent years convinced I didn’t deserve you, and then I made a thousand mistakes trying to prove the opposite. And yet, you kept becoming. You loved big enough for both of us, and I’m proud of you for all the ways you have forgiven things I never figured out how to say out loud.”
My face is soaked. The letter keeps going, soft as a fingertip smoothing a wrinkled sheet.
“I wish I could promise I will always get it right,” Kingsley reads. “I can’t. But I can promise this: I wanted you more than anything. We fought like hell for you. I learned to give myself shots on a bathroom floor for you. I sang into the echo of an empty nursery for you. When you kicked for the first time, I thought—there she is. There you are. And I have been chasing the light of you ever since.”
Something inside me tears—not a neat rip, more like a seam that’s been straining for years, finally… letting go.
On the screens above, new footage blooms: Mom in a dim room, hair slicked back, no makeup, one hand on her small belly, the other on a guitar. The sound is thin and home-made, the way truth often is. She swallows, and smiles, and whispers, “Okay, Dottie. For you.”
Kingsley sets the page aside. “Delilah said the rest better than I ever could,” she says, and places her fingers on the frets.
The lyrics are there already—most of them anyway. A lullaby that grows up halfway through. The melody starts close to the breastbone, climbs when it says be brave, falls when it says come home. In the chorus, there’s a gap, a few words left open, waiting for a name that never got written in. But it will. At least I hope so. On the screens, my mother closes her eyes and holds the last chord, and I still hear mine.
The auditorium dissolves into a thousand soft sobs. People I’ve never met are crying for a woman I thought I disapproved of, and for a daughter who never learned to hear what was sung to her in the dark.
I cry because my wedding day is abstract math now. That letter will never be pressed into my palm by a living hand, because I can finally admit: my mother didn’t withhold love—she channeled it, imperfectly, through the only current she trusted. And I refused to plug in.
I cry because Camden isn’t here, because I took a pair of scissors to the wire between us and called it safety.
Kingsley lets the last note fade to a thread. She doesn’t speak for a long time. No one does. Even the techs are statues in black.
When she finally rises, she folds the papers. “Family first,” she says into the hush and nods toward us. The lights ease up, and the audience is on their feet in a wave that hits and keeps hitting. Dad is shaking beside me. I turn and see that his face is a mess too—wet, open, younger and older than I’ve ever seen him.
He touches the lace at my shoulder—the dress that once held me before there was a me. “She kept that one,” he whispers, broken-proud. “Lucky dress.”
Lucky, I think, and dangerous. It makes me brave enough to admit what I’ve been afraid to: I misunderstood my mother. And I am in the middle of making the same mistake with the man I love.
The lights rise. Renee appears with tissues and a hand on my back, the practiced comfort of someone who’s shepherded people through too many firsts and lasts. The room begins to buzz again—footsteps, sniffles, the gentle roar of a thousand conversations. Above us, the screens cycle to a stop: Delilah mid-laugh, head thrown back, mouth open to the ceiling. Alive in all the ways that count.
I press Dad’s fingers, then stand. My legs tremble. Every part of me trembles. I wipe my face, useless.
“I need a minute,” I tell Renee, and she nods, no questions.
In the shadowed wing off the aisle, I lean against a cool wall and breathe like Mira once taught me—four in, six out. It barely touches the quake under my ribs.
In my purse, my phone is a lit pulse. My thumb hovers. If I text Camden now, will he answer? Will he come? Do I deserve it if he does?
Onstage, Kingsley returns to the mic to thank the crowd, to announce the rescue fund totals, to say Delilah once more so everyone can say it back.
I slide my phone open anyway. My hands shake so hard I can barely type.
I heard her, Cam, I write, and then delete it. No. This requires an immediate face-to-face. And I know who can help me make it happen.
I scroll through my contacts. If this works, I might have time to fix the one thing my mother can’t teach me from the other side of a screen: how to run toward love, not away.
Behind me, twenty-five hundred people rise together as Kingsley speaks my mother’s name one last time. It rolls through me like surf, like absolution, like a benediction I haven’t earned yet and want to.
The new text sends. I press the phone closed and shut my eyes.
When the house lights bloom again, the crowd hums with aftershocks. Kingsley finds me near the stage stairs, mascara streaks and all. Her eyeliner has run too, which makes us look like a matching set of mourners and survivors.
“I’m sorry if that was too public for you, baby girl,” she says softly. Her voice is rough, like she’s been swallowing tearsbetween chords. “Delilah would’ve smacked me if I didn’t read it, but—”
I shake my head before she can finish. My throat burns from crying, but my voice comes out steady. “No. Don’t apologize. That was perfect.” I look down at the folded letter trembling in her hand. “I didn’t know how much I needed to hear her until tonight.”
Kingsley gives a small, aching smile. She presses the pages into my palm, curling my fingers around them. “Then you keep these. They’re yours now.”
I try to read the first line again, but my eyes are too swollen for the words to behave. The ink blurs into dark rivers. After a moment, I shake my head and offer them back. “Can you hold on to them for me? I’ll want to hear it again—someday. Maybe on the day she meant it for. With the right man, that is.”
