Part Three: The Money

Nick’s house had a mortgage. Kelsey’s income had covered half of it. Without her paycheck, Nick couldn’t keep up.

The bank started sending letters. Nick hid them in a drawer. I found them while looking for scissors.

“Nick,” I said, holding them up. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He wouldn’t look at me.

“Because I didn’t want you to think I was failing them,” he said. “Kelsey would’ve known what to do.”

I put fifty-two thousand dollars of the house money on his mortgage.

I did it the next week. I went to the bank in Shelbyville, the same bank where Kelsey had worked. Her coworkers hugged me at the counter. One of them cried while she processed the payment.

It brought the mortgage current and paid down enough principal that Nick’s payments dropped by almost four hundred dollars a month.

The kids could stay in the only home they knew. Their mother’s home. The house with her handprints in the concrete on the back patio and her height marks on the pantry doorframe.

The rest of the money went to everything else.

Groceries. Shoes, because children grow out of shoes every five minutes. School pictures. Field trips. The dentist, when Owen chipped his front tooth on the monkey bars. A new mattress for Lily, who’d been sleeping on one with a broken spring. Gracie’s speech therapy when she started stuttering after the funeral.

By the end of the second year, there was almost nothing left.

There was never any paper.

Nick didn’t ask me to sign anything. I didn’t ask him to sign anything either. It never occurred to me.

It was family. It was my daughter’s house and my daughter’s children. You don’t write up a contract for that.

And even if I’d thought about it, I knew one thing for certain. Dragging my daughter’s husband into court would have cost me the only pieces of her I had left.

Those three kids.

Part Four: The Years in Between

I packed lunches every morning.

Turkey and cheese for Lily, cut into triangles. Peanut butter and honey for Owen, crusts off. Gracie wanted something different every day, and I learned to keep track.

I drove them to school. I went to every parent-teacher conference, because Nick couldn’t get off work. I sat in the bleachers at Owen’s T-ball games and cheered louder than any of the parents.

I sat up with Owen through the croup when he was six.

He woke up at two in the morning barking like a seal and struggling to breathe. I carried him into the bathroom, turned the shower on as hot as it would go, and sat on the closed toilet holding him in the steam. Then I wrapped him in a blanket and took him out to the back porch into the cold January air, the way my own mother taught me.

He fell asleep on my shoulder around four. I didn’t move until the sun came up.

I learned every word of every song Gracie loved.

Songs from cartoons. Songs from a movie about a frozen princess that I watched, by my best guess, three hundred times. Songs she made up herself in the bathtub about her stuffed lamb and the moon.

I can still sing all of them. I probably always will.

I braided Lily’s hair every morning, the way Kelsey used to. French braids on school days, a ponytail on weekends. It took me months to get as good as her mother.

One morning, about a year after the funeral, Lily looked at me in the bathroom mirror while I braided.

“You do it the same,” she said quietly. “Like Mommy.”

I had to stop for a minute. She didn’t say anything else. She just waited.

Nick worked overtime. As much as they’d give him. He came home at seven or eight most nights, ate whatever I’d saved on a plate in the oven, and went to bed.

Some nights, I heard him in the garage.

He’d go out there after the kids were asleep and sit in Kelsey’s car. Her little blue Honda, which he couldn’t bring himself to sell. I could hear him through the kitchen wall. Crying. Deep, terrible sobs, like something was being pulled out of him.

I never said anything about it. I never told him I could hear.

I never held it against him. Not once. Grief doesn’t have a schedule. Grief doesn’t care if you have three children who need dinner.

There were good days too. I want you to know that.

The Christmas Gracie gave everyone a rock she’d painted herself. The summer we drove to Lake Monroe and Owen caught his first fish and cried because he felt sorry for it. The birthday when Lily turned nine and asked for a cookbook so she could make her mother’s chocolate chip cookies.

We made them together. They didn’t taste exactly like Kelsey’s. But they were close.