‘Good Enough’
— Joyce Chong
Coming here seemed like a good idea, since I was driving through town. That wasn’t exactly true, but it was only two and a half hours in the wrong direction.
In ‘Good Enough’, Grant explores the alienness of a long delayed reunion, the picture coming together like a set of ill-fitting puzzle pieces falling into place over time. The story unravels in short bits about the past spaced in with the present. This story, seen through the eyes of a mother who left her family long ago, doesn’t seek a happy ending or redemption or spontaneous change in its characters. I revel in the quiet reality, the sheer ordinariness of both their lives so much after the fact.
The day I left, the kids sat quietly on the sofa and watched me pack my things. Their father and I had picked up that plaid sofa on the side of the road. Someone decided it wasn’t good enough anymore and pinned a sign on it: free.
There is something sad, something irreversible and decided about where these two women stand at this point in time, and it’s made clear that no force of fiction can make anything otherwise. The mother’s new life is notably absent from this story, leaving the scene as confined and remote as the town she’d left her family in. The dialogue seems to stretch miles, two strangers peering over at each other from a distance of years and miles and countless unquantifiable small lifetimes.
I wished I could tell her something beautifully sad about leaving: that I waded in an ocean of grief or that the loss rested in my heart like a heavy stone. I was happier after leaving and I couldn’t tell her that.