Part Five: Ashley
Last winter, Nick met Ashley.
She was thirty, a receptionist at a dental office in Greensburg. She was soft-spoken, with light brown hair and big gray eyes. She’d grown up in a small town about an hour south.
Nick met her at a grief support group at the Methodist church. Her mother had died a year earlier. They sat next to each other three weeks in a row before he worked up the nerve to ask her to coffee.
He brought her to the house for dinner in February.
She was nervous. She brought a pan of brownies and apologized for them before anyone had tasted them. She asked the kids about their favorite subjects at school. She laughed at Owen’s knock-knock jokes, even the bad ones.
She was good with the kids. Gracie climbed into her lap by the end of the evening.
I liked her. I really did.
After she left, I found Nick in the kitchen washing dishes.
“She’s lovely,” I said.
He stopped washing. His shoulders relaxed a little.
“You think so?”
“I do,” I said. “Kelsey would have liked her.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he turned around and hugged me. He’d never done that before.
“Thank you, Roxanne,” he said.
They married in June.
A small ceremony in the backyard of her aunt’s house. Fifty guests. A string of lights across the patio. Lily was a junior bridesmaid in a lavender dress. Owen carried the rings on a little pillow. Gracie threw rose petals so hard that half of them hit the minister.
I sat in the second row. I cried a little. Not from sadness. From something more complicated.
I was happy for Nick. Truly. He’d been drowning for two and a half years, and now somebody had thrown him a rope.
But my daughter’s husband was marrying someone else. And somewhere inside me, a small, quiet voice whispered, What happens to me now?
Part Six: Rent
Two weeks after the wedding, Nick sat down across the kitchen table from me.
It was a Sunday evening. The kids were in the backyard catching fireflies. Ashley was upstairs unpacking boxes. I’d made pot roast, and the dishes were still in the sink.
Nick folded his hands on the table. He looked at them, not at me.
“Roxanne,” he said. “I think it’s time you got your own place.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
I’d known it was coming. Of course I had. A newly married couple doesn’t want their dead wife’s mother living in the spare room. I’d been preparing myself for weeks.
Still, it hit me like cold water.
“All right,” I said quietly. “I understand.”
He seemed relieved. He started talking faster.
“It’s just that Ashley and I need to build our own family,” he said. “The kids need to see her as their mom now. It’s hard for them to do that with you here. With you being, you know, Kelsey’s mom.”
“I understand,” I said again.
Then I asked him the question I’d been afraid to ask.
“Nick,” I said quietly. “What about the house money?”
He didn’t look up.
“The fifty-two thousand,” I said. “That I put on the mortgage. I don’t need all of it back at once. But I’m going to need first and last month’s rent for an apartment. And I don’t have much left.”
He was quiet for a long time. He kept looking at his hands.
Then he said it.
“That was rent,” he said. “You lived here almost three years. That covers it.”
Rent.
For raising his children.
For the croup and the braids and the parent-teacher conferences. For three hundred viewings of a movie about a frozen princess. For every lunch and every bath and every night I lay awake listening to him cry in the garage.
Rent.
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t raise my voice. I’ve never been good at raising my voice. Twenty-six years of delivering mail teaches you to keep your head down and keep moving.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll start looking tomorrow.”
I got up from the table. I washed the dishes. I dried them and put them away. Then I went upstairs to my room and closed the door.
I didn’t cry until I was alone.
I sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the spare room and pressed a pillow over my face so the children wouldn’t hear me. I cried for Kelsey. I cried for my little brick house and Mister the cat. I cried for twenty-six years on the same mail route that I’d given up without a second thought.
And I cried because I knew Nick wasn’t cruel.
He wasn’t cruel by nature. I’d lived with him for almost three years. I’d seen him cry. I’d seen him tuck Gracie in and kiss Lily’s forehead and teach Owen how to throw a curveball.
He was grieving. He wanted a fresh start. He wanted his children to see Ashley as their mother.
And with me in the house, Kelsey was still in every room. In every braid and every lunch box and every lullaby.
I understood that.
I just didn’t know why it had to cost me everything.
