I’ve carried this family on my shoulders for seventy-three years. Seventy-three years of giving everything I had, sacrificing my dreams, my youth, my health. And this morning, I finally understood how they saw me: not as a mother, not as a partner, but as free labor.
“Mom, you stay at the farm,” David told me, adjusting his expensive sunglasses with that dismissive gesture he’d learned from his wife.
“Someone has to look after the garden.”
Amber stood beside him in her new red dress, looking at me as if I were just another employee. Her mother Catherine checked her phone, not even bothering to pretend I mattered.
“It’s only for a week, Mrs. Margaret,” Catherine murmured without looking up.
“You understand, don’t you?”
Only a week.
As if planting and watering were a game. As if these seventy-three years had been nothing. I watched them load their suitcases into the car—suitcases filled with clothes I had washed and ironed, towels I had folded, shoes I had cleaned.
They were going to the coast to spend the money this land produces while I stayed here under the burning Pennsylvania sun with my hands in the soil they believed belonged to them.
But as the dust from their car settled on the road and silence filled the empty farmhouse, the phone rang. The sound cut through the air like a knife.
“Mrs. Margaret,” the voice from Pennsylvania Trust Bank said, “we need to confirm some urgent transactions.”
My heart stopped—not from fear, but from a suspicion that had been growing like a weed in my chest for months.
“What kind of transactions?” I asked, though I already knew I wouldn’t like the answer.
“Your son David attempted to transfer fifty thousand dollars this morning. There are also attempts to change ownership on several accounts. Since you’re the primary account holder, we need your authorization.”
Fifty thousand dollars.
The money we’d saved from selling cattle last month.
The money that was supposed to fix the leaking roof, buy my blood pressure medication, ensure this farm continued producing. “I don’t authorize anything,” I said in a voice I barely recognized.
“Block everything. Right now.”
I hung up and stood in the kitchen where I’d prepared thousands of meals for a family that saw me as a burden.
The yellow walls I’d painted ten years ago seemed like silent witnesses to everything I’d endured.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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