I hadn’t even been invited to the party happening in my own son’s house. I could hear the laughter, the clinking of champagne glasses, the cheerful countdown to midnight echoing through the walls while I sat alone in the small guest room that had become my world.
My name is Dorothy, I’m seventy-five years old, and on New Year’s Eve I overheard my daughter-in-law Jacqueline say the words that would change everything.
“After the holidays, we’re moving her somewhere with activities,” she’d said, her voice carrying that bright, dismissive tone she used when discussing inconveniences. “She’s not needed here anymore.”
I’d been standing in the hallway, holding a plate with the sandwich they’d given me for dinner while the caterers arranged elaborate hors d’oeuvres for guests downstairs. I’d frozen, the paper plate trembling in my hands, waiting for my son Mason to object. To defend me. To say something—anything—that indicated I mattered.
His silence was a betrayal sharper than any words could have been.
“Mom, it’s for the best,” he’d finally muttered when he noticed me standing there. He studied the expensive Italian tiles I’d helped pay for with money from my parents’ estate, unable to meet my eyes. “You’ll have people your own age. Activities. It’s a nice place.”
A nice place. As if loneliness could be cured with bingo and fluorescent lighting.
I’d moved in with Mason after my husband passed, when he insisted I shouldn’t be alone. That was three years ago, before Jacqueline entered our lives, before the big house in the suburbs, before I became invisible. I’d cooked their meals, watched their children until the boys grew old enough to be embarrassed by their grandmother’s outdated clothes. I’d cleaned, organized, made myself small and useful, hoping that usefulness would equal belonging.
It hadn’t.
Now I was just old—no longer useful, taking up space in a guest room Jacqueline wanted to convert into a meditation studio.
I looked around at my small space, at the photographs on the nightstand. Mason as a gap-toothed seven-year-old. His college graduation. His wedding, where I wore a dress Jacqueline called “quaint” in a tone that meant something else entirely. The quilt my mother had made—the only luxury I’d allowed myself to keep. Everything else had been gradually removed, donated, thrown away because it didn’t fit Jacqueline’s aesthetic.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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