My mother chose my baby brother over me, and I spent 21 years thinking she’d thrown away the card I made her.

I was 10 when my mother, Carol, married Walt. By the next year, she had Jamie, a round-cheeked baby she carried from room to room like the answer to a question. I was living at my grandmother Elsie’s house by then. Mom said it was temporary. Grandma said, “Love doesn’t pick favorites.” I believed Grandma. I wasn’t sure what I believed about Mom.

Grandma lived in a paper-mill town in Maine. Her kitchen always smelled like toast, even when she hadn’t made any. The old wall clock ticked too loud, and she kept a jar of rubber bands beside the phone. I don’t know why I remember that jar. Maybe because she never told me I was too much trouble to keep.

Mom dropped me off with two grocery bags and a promise to come back for me when things settled down. She had married Walt, moved into his house, and was trying to make room for a new baby. She said, “You’ll be happier with Grandma for a little while.”

I asked how long a little while was. Mom checked her watch. “We’ll see, Beth.”

Grandma took the bags from my hands. She didn’t ask what Mom meant. She just said, “Come on, kiddo. I’ve got the good towels out.”

I hated that I was relieved.

For a while, Mom called on Sundays. The calls were short, mostly about school and whether I was being nice to Grandma. I could hear Jamie making little noises in the background. When I asked if I could come over, Mom said the house was busy. When I asked when I could meet my brother, she said, “Soon.”

So when she invited me to a family dinner the next year, I worked on a card for her all week. I cut it out of blue construction paper and drew a house with three people in it. I drew myself smaller, off to one side. I don’t know if I meant to. I noticed it later.

I wrote, “I love you, Mom.” The letters leaned downhill. I was proud of that card anyway. I’d made it at Grandma’s kitchen table while the radio played the weather report, and Grandma had sat with me without asking what I was drawing.

At Mom’s house, Jamie had a high chair at the table. He had a little bib with a duck on it. Walt held him while Mom spooned mashed carrots into his mouth. I sat on a dining chair with my knees touching the underside of the table.

Mom asked whether school was going okay. I said yes. She turned back to Jamie.

I waited until after dinner to give her the card. I’d put it in my coat pocket to keep the corners from bending. My hand was a little damp when I pulled it out.

“I made you something.”

She took it. For half a second, she looked at the front. Then she set it beside her plate.

“Oh, what would I need it for? I have everything I want.”

Walt made a small sound. Not quite a cough. Mom reached for a napkin and wiped Jamie’s mouth.

I didn’t cry at the table. I sat there and watched a bit of orange carrot slide off the bib onto the floor.

Grandma drove me home. The radio was off. At a red light, she asked if I wanted to talk about it.

“No.”

“All right,” she said.

I didn’t give Mom another card. I stopped asking when I could visit. That wasn’t brave or mature. I was 11, and I decided I’d rather act like I didn’t care than let her see that I did.

Mom called less after that. Then she and Walt moved to New Hampshire. I heard about it from Grandma, who had heard it from a cousin. Mom said the move made sense for Walt’s job. She said they’d keep in touch.

They did, for a while. A birthday card. A Christmas phone call. A few visits that always seemed to end early. Mom would ask if I was doing well, then ask Grandma how she was managing. Once I said, “I’m right here.”

Mom said, “I know, Beth.”

That was the whole answer.

Jamie got older. He had school pictures and soccer games and a gap between his front teeth. Mom sent Grandma a few pictures. Grandma put them in a drawer, not on the wall. I pretended not to care when she showed me one.

“He looks like Walt,” I said.

“He does,” Grandma said. “You want the rest of your tea?”

I wanted to ask if Mom ever showed him the card. I didn’t. I was scared she’d say she hadn’t kept it.

At 16, I went to see Mom for a weekend. I hoped that if I acted easygoing, maybe she’d stop treating me like a visit she had to fit between errands. Jamie was 5 then. He showed me his toy trucks and asked if I’d come to his school play.

“Maybe,” I said.

Mom stood by the sink and said, “You could try to be warmer with him.”

I looked at her. “I’ve met him three times.”

She dried her hands on a dish towel. “He’s your brother.”

“I know what he is.”

It was a mean thing to say. I knew it as soon as I said it, but I didn’t take it back. Mom said I could go upstairs if I was tired. I went home the next day, glad to leave and mad that I was glad.

Grandma never made me call Mom. She also never told me Mom was a bad person. She’d say, “Your mother has her own mess to sort out,” and then she’d change the subject.

I’m sure that helped me. It also let Mom off the hook in my head, sometimes. I told myself there had to be a reason she couldn’t make room for me. I even told myself I was too prickly to love. Kids are good at making the grown-ups’ choices about themselves.

I left town after high school for two years, came back, and got an accounts-payable job at a clinic. I rented a small place close enough to Grandma to bring her groceries. I wasn’t always kind about it. If she asked me to stay for supper, I’d check my phone and sigh like I had a better offer waiting.

“Don’t rush,” she’d say.

“I’m not rushing.”

“You’ve got your keys in your hand.”

I’d put them down. Then I’d stay.

When I was 27, Mom called to tell me Jamie was graduating. She asked if I’d come to the ceremony. I said I had work, though I could have asked for the day off. I didn’t want to sit there as the extra kid who had come late to her own family.

Mom went quiet. Then she said, “He’d like you to be there.”

That made me mad. She could have said she wanted me there. Instead, I said, “I hope he has a good day.”

I went to work. I told myself it was the cleaner choice. It wasn’t.

Jamie sent me a graduation photo a few days later. He’d written, “Sorry Mom’s weird about stuff. Hope you’re good.” I saved the message and never answered. I wish I’d answered. I could have said, “I’m okay, and I hope you are too.” I didn’t.

Grandma knew about the call. I’d told her because I was still angry and wanted somebody to agree with me.

“You could go,” she said.

“I don’t want to.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

She nodded. “All right.”

That was Grandma. She let me be difficult without making me pay for it. I thought that was what love looked like. I still do, mostly.

By the time I was 32, Grandma needed help with stairs. She was still sharp about everything else. She kept the jar of rubber bands by the phone and could remember the price of every house she’d ever lived in. I asked Mom if she wanted to visit.

“She doesn’t like the drive,” I said, which was a guess. “You should come before it gets harder.”

Mom said, “I’ll try.”

She didn’t come. I decided I was done asking.

Grandma died a few months later. It wasn’t sudden, exactly. She’d been getting tired, and then one afternoon she couldn’t get out of her chair. At the hospital, she held my hand and said, “You’re going to be all right, Beth.”

I said, “You don’t have to take care of me now.”

“I know.”

She died two days later.

Mom came to the funeral. She stood beside me at the back of the church and held a paper cup of coffee she didn’t drink. I noticed the little brown ring the cup left on her fingers. I don’t know why. I suppose I was looking for something to notice besides her face.

People said things about Grandma. How she’d helped them, how she’d made a good pie, how she’d remembered birthdays. Mom said very little. When the service ended, she touched my elbow.

“I’m sorry, Beth.”

“Thank you for coming.”

She looked like she wanted to say more. I went to greet the people from town instead.

I didn’t want Mom to see me cry. I didn’t want her to think she could step back into my life just because we’d lost the same person. And I was angry that she had made me think about her at Grandma’s funeral at all.

A few days later, I was home sorting sympathy cards at the kitchen table when someone knocked. I opened the door, and Mom was standing there with a small brown envelope in her hand.

“I found something,” she said.

I didn’t invite her in right away. “What is it?”

“I think it belongs to you.”

She held the envelope out. I could see the corner of a blue card through the open flap. The paper had gone soft along the fold.

I knew the card before I touched it.

Mom came in. I took the envelope and sat down at the table. She sat across from me, still wearing her coat. For a few seconds neither of us said anything. The old wall clock had gone with Grandma’s things, but I could hear the refrigerator hum.

“You kept it?” I said.

“Yes.”

“For all this time?”

She folded her hands. “I did.”

I pulled the card out. There was a small tear on one corner. My child’s drawing was still there, the crooked house, the three people, me off to the side. I could see the line where I’d pressed too hard with the crayon.

I opened it. Inside, in my big, uneven letters, I had written, “I love you, Mom.”

I rubbed my thumb over the word Mom. It was too faded to rub off, obviously. I kept doing it anyway.

“I thought you threw it away,” I said.

“I know.”

“You told me you had everything you wanted.”

Mom looked down at the table. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No.”

“I was trying to make it sound like I didn’t need anything. I didn’t know how to be a mother to two kids, and I let that become your problem.”

I didn’t say anything.

She kept going, but she didn’t make a speech. “Walt wanted a fresh start. I wanted one too. I told myself you were safe with your grandmother. You were. I used that to stop showing up.”

I watched her fingers press into one another. They were the same fingers that had set my card beside her plate.

“You could have called more,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You could have come.”

“Yes.”

“You could have said you were sorry before Grandma died.”

Mom nodded once. “Yes.”

There wasn’t anything to argue with in that. I wanted her to explain more. I also didn’t want a reason that would make it all right. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from her, which was a familiar problem.

She told me she had found the card in a box while sorting papers at home. She’d kept it in the back of a drawer. It had gone with her through the move to New Hampshire and back again after Walt died. I asked why she’d brought it now.

“Because I couldn’t leave it in a drawer anymore,” she said. “And because I’m sorry.”

“That’s not the same as coming back.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

That answer bothered me more than if she’d tried to defend herself. I wanted something to push against. Instead, she sat there with her coat on and her hands held together, letting me be angry.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do with this,” I said, lifting the card.

“I don’t expect you to do anything.”

“You came here.”

“I wanted to bring it to you.”

The words were plain. Maybe that was all she could offer. Maybe it was all I could stand to hear.

I looked at the picture again. My younger self had drawn the house with a yellow door. Grandma’s house had a blue door. Mom’s house had a yellow one. I’d made that choice carefully. I could almost see myself coloring it at the kitchen table, stopping to sharpen a crayon with the little plastic sharpener that caught the shavings.

I’d thought that card was proof she didn’t want me. Finding out she’d kept it didn’t undo that. If anything, it made the years feel stranger. She had kept a piece of me in a drawer while I grew up without her.

Mom’s eyes were wet now. She pressed her lips together and looked at the card, not at me.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

For the first time, I believed she meant it. That wasn’t the same as forgiving her. I’m careful about that now.

I got up and put the kettle on. It was a thing Grandma used to do when she didn’t know what to say. I almost laughed at myself for copying her. Mom asked if she should go.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You can have tea.”

She took off her coat and laid it over the back of the chair. We sat at the table while the kettle made its small, rattling sound. Neither of us said that this fixed anything.

Mom told me Jamie had moved to Portland and was working at a garage. She said he had a little girl. I asked her how old. She told me, and I did the math in my head. I felt bad that I hadn’t known. Then I felt annoyed that I was being asked to feel bad, even though nobody had asked me.

I said, “I’d like to see a picture sometime.”

Mom nodded. “I can ask him.”

“Don’t make it a big thing.”

“I won’t.”

We drank tea. She didn’t reach across the table. I didn’t reach for her. The card lay between us, with the little yellow door showing.

When Mom left, she asked if she could call me the next week. I said she could. I didn’t promise to answer. She didn’t ask me to.

I put the card in the kitchen drawer with the rubber bands I’d taken from Grandma’s house. I didn’t throw it away. I didn’t put it on the wall, either.

The next morning, I found one of the old rubber bands stretched around the card to keep it shut.