Very soon after the surgery, she began to experience less pain and walk better. We had fun together, driving to appointments, often eating out: Roberta felt free with her money then. She is a good company, always ready to laugh or listen closely.
Roberta is very kin on fitting in. If she listens to a song, even in a language that she doesn't know, she tries to sing along, totally believing that she can follow the lyrics. Because of her desire to please, sometimes, I think that she laughs at my jokes not because they are funny but so that I'd like her.
In fact, some of the things that she's been saying about her life just didn't ring true. They seemed like something out of Daniele Steele's novels. I told some people about my doubts, but I felt like such a cynic. It couldn't be true, could it? After all, I've met her at the church, she seemed to know top leaders of our movement and a lot of the members of our congregation have been bowing and scraping to her and to me, by extension.
And so it went. Like with my church, I didn't know, what was the truth and what was the lie with Roberta, until...
Just before Roberta's eightieth birthday, Taka, my husband, insisted that our son writes a blog about her life. He then translated it into Japanese and sent it out to the Japanese members of our church (Roberta worked with a lot of them before). Lo and behold, my pastor called and said that we had to talk about the blog, because there were some untrue things there, and the Japanese sisters knew it and were upset by it.
No comments:
Post a Comment