I was born Naomi Marie Blackwood, became Naomi Canton when I married Nicholas in 1981, and remained that person until three weeks ago, the day after we buried him. I’m 68 years old, with arthritic hands that still remember how to bake the sourdough bread my son Brandon used to beg for on Sunday mornings, and the way my daughter Melissa’s hair felt when I braided it before elementary school. I’m telling you this so you understand that before everything collapsed, I was simply a mother who believed she had raised good children.
Nicholas’s cancer took fourteen months to kill him. Pancreatic—the silent executioner that gives you just enough time to put your affairs in order, but not enough time to actually live with the knowledge. We kept it quiet at first, just between us.
Our children were busy with their own lives. Brandon with his financial consulting career in Boston that seemed to require him to miss every major holiday. Melissa with her perpetually failing wellness businesses in Denver that somehow always needed “one more” investment from Dad.
“They don’t need this burden yet,” Nicholas had said, staring at the ceiling of our bedroom, the morphine making his words slur slightly. “Let them live their lives a little longer without this shadow.” I nodded because I loved him. But I knew better.
I knew our children. When they finally arrived at our modest farmhouse on the outskirts of Milfield, Pennsylvania—the same house where they’d grown up, where Nicholas and I had built Canton Family Orchards from twenty acres of neglected apple trees into one of the most respected organic fruit operations in the state—they didn’t come with comfort. They came with questions about the will.
“Mom, I’m just trying to be practical,” Brandon said, his voice taking on that condescending tone he’d perfected sometime after his first six-figure bonus. We were sitting at the kitchen table, Nicholas asleep upstairs, when he first broached the subject. “The medical bills must be piling up.
Have you two considered downsizing? The business can’t be easy for you to manage alone.”
Brandon had left Milfield at eighteen, declaring small-town Pennsylvania as suffocating as the soil that had paid for his education. He’d visited only when absolutely necessary, usually staying in a hotel rather than his childhood bedroom because “the country air aggravates my sinuses.” But suddenly, during his father’s final weeks, he developed a profound interest in the family business that had embarrassed him throughout his adolescence.
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