Chapter 12

"I told her I would go over and watch you. Don't let him see the news. OK. If he asks anything, just let him know that it will be OK. I told her, It will be OK. She said, The subways are a mess. I'm going to walk home. I should be there in an hour. She said, I love you. She had been married to your father for twelve years. I had known her for fifteen years. It was the first time she told me she loved me. That was when I knew she knew" (226).

A few things stood out to me in the passage. The first was that it took Oskar's mother 15 years of knowing each other, 12 years of being her step-daughter to finally say to Oskar's grandmother that she loves her. That shows us that the mother and grandmother clearly don't have a good relationship with each other. They see each other everyday, talk all the time but after reading this its clear that they only spend so much time together because they share only two things in common, they both love Oskar and they both love Thomas, Oskar's father. Another thing that stood out to me was the OK's in all caps. The emphasis on everything being OK shows that the two of them are worried and know everything isn't OK they just don't want to admit it. The last thing that stood out to me was the last line of the quote, "That was when I knew she knew" (226). The I love you that was said for the first time caught the grandmother off guard. She wasn't expecting her to say that especially since she had never said it before but because of this the grandmother knew that the mother knew everything wasn't going to be OK unlike the many OK's that had been said in the conversion prior to that. Deep down inside the grandmother knew she had lost her son and once she said this, it was clear to the grandmother that the mother knew she had lost her husband. But neither wanted to admit the truth.