The Blue Shutters
My mother called on a Wednesday evening while I was walking out of Boston Housing Court with my bag on one shoulder and the particular headache that comes from spending nine hours helping people defend themselves against landlords who believe that ownership confers moral authority. I almost let it ring through. I could see her name on the screen and I could feel, in the particular quality of the vibration, a call that had nothing gentle in it.
But I answered because I had always answered, because the habit of being available to my family was older than my ability to recognize what it cost me, and because some part of me still believed, after thirty six years of evidence to the contrary, that one of these calls would be the one where she asked how I was doing. She did not ask how I was doing. She said, “You have forty eight hours to get your things out.
That house is Stephanie’s now.” No hello. No context. No softening of any kind.
Just a verdict delivered in the flat, certain voice she used when she had decided something and expected reality to comply. The house was my grandmother Elaine’s. A three bedroom colonial in the suburbs west of the city, white clapboard, wraparound porch, blue shutters that I had helped her paint when I was twelve, standing on a stepladder in the July heat with a brush in my hand and paint in my hair while she directed from below with the precise, unflappable authority of a woman who had been doing things the right way for seven decades and did not intend to stop on my account.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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