Part Four: Somewhere Else

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. I just stood there at my own kitchen counter in my robe.

Somewhere else to live. In my own house.

The two-story brick colonial on a quiet street in the Dundee neighborhood that Richard and I bought in 1987 with a down payment we’d saved for nine years. The house we’d spent thirty-one years paying off, one check at a time. The house where I’d brought Brandon home from the hospital in a blue knit cap. The house where Richard took his last breath, in a hospital bed in the living room by the front window, seven years ago this coming March, with my hand on his chest.

“Are you threatening to throw me out?” I whispered.

Brandon shrugged. “I’m asking you to contribute,” he said. “That’s not unreasonable.”

Vanessa glanced at her phone. “We’re going to be late, babe,” she said. “Brunch is at nine.”

Brandon picked up his car keys from the bowl by the door. He pointed down the hallway with them.

“And clean the guest bathroom,” he said. “Five o’clock, Mom. Don’t make this difficult.”

Then they left. The front door slammed so hard behind them that a glass ornament on the Christmas tree in the front room trembled on its branch, an old blown-glass bird with a white feather tail that had belonged to my mother.

I stood at the counter. For several minutes, the only sound in the house was the refrigerator humming.

On the refrigerator door, held up by magnets from every vacation we’d ever taken, were the family photographs. Brandon at six, grinning, missing both front teeth. Brandon at seventeen in his cap and gown, holding his diploma from Central High. And Brandon standing beside his father on our front porch at our last Christmas together, eight years ago, both of them in matching ugly reindeer sweaters I’d bought as a joke, both of them laughing.

I touched that last picture with one finger.

“You wouldn’t recognize him anymore, Rich,” I whispered.

Part Five: Staying With Us

When Richard died, Brandon moved back into the house within a month. He said I shouldn’t be alone. He said it in a soft voice at the funeral luncheon, holding my hand, and I was so grateful I cried.

At first, he was wonderful. He fixed the leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom that Richard had been meaning to get to for a year. He mowed the lawn every Saturday. He drove me to the grocery store and carried the bags.

Then, slowly, so slowly I didn’t notice it happening, the little things began to change.

Vanessa moved in after the wedding, four years ago. Then Richard’s old leather recliner disappeared from the den. Vanessa said it smelled musty. She’d donated it to Goodwill without asking me. Then his woodworking tools in the garage. Then his desk lamp, his record collection, his Cornhuskers blanket.

The dining room became Vanessa’s “entertaining room,” with new white chairs and a crystal chandelier she bought with money from the emergency account. My sewing machine and my quilting supplies, which had lived in the sunny back bedroom for thirty years, were moved into the basement next to the furnace. The back bedroom became Vanessa’s walk-in closet.

And when guests came over, which was often, Brandon would put his arm around my shoulders and introduce me with a smile.

“This is my mom,” he’d say. “She’s staying with us.”

Staying with us. In my house. The house with my name on the deed.

I kept quiet. I want to be honest about that. I kept quiet for six years, because I was terrified. Brandon is my only child. Richard was gone. My sister was in Arizona. My friends were scattered, or dead, or busy with their own grandchildren. If I lost Brandon, I’d have no one.

So I let him move my sewing machine to the basement. I let Vanessa give away my husband’s chair. I kept transferring eight hundred dollars on the fifth of every month. And I told myself it was the price of having a family.

It turned out that fear had cost me a great deal more than money.