I pointed toward the untouched table.
“When you called him and told him there wasn’t room for him, you weren’t protecting your parents’ comfort. You were telling him that their preferences mattered more than everything he has meant to me.”
Karen didn’t interrupt.
I continued.
“Your parents have spent years looking down on him because he worked with his hands.”
“That isn’t what I—”
“I know you probably didn’t think of it that way.”
She stopped.
“And that’s part of the problem.”
We talked for a long time.
It wasn’t easy.
Karen wasn’t an inherently cruel person.
That was important.
But she had absorbed her parents’ view of status so completely that she no longer realized when she was repeating it.
She believed she had simply been managing an uncomfortable situation.
I saw it differently.
“My father built the table we ate on today,” I told her.
