I came home from three weeks of sleeping in hospital chairs and lumpy guest beds to find my life stacked in cardboard boxes in the garage. My suitcase slipped from my hand and thumped onto the concrete. The air smelled like motor oil and dust, not dinner and laundry detergent the way the house usually did at four in the afternoon.
On the old beer fridge in the corner, a crooked magnet shaped like the American flag held up a crayon drawing my grandson had made of “Grandpa’s house.” Behind me, the front door of that same house slammed. Kevin, my son‑in‑law, filled the doorway between the garage and the hallway, arms crossed, blocking the warm light like he owned it. “You don’t live here anymore,” he said, a smug half‑smile on his face.
“My dad needs the room.”
I looked from the boxes labeled in my daughter’s handwriting—MERLE – CLOTHES, MERLE – BOOKS, MERLE – PERSONAL—to that little flag magnet on the fridge and back to Kevin. “Then I’m taking out another piece of trash,” I told him quietly. “And it’s not the boxes.”
I didn’t know it yet, but that was the first moment I stopped being a guest in my own life and started being the one who would end this.
Four hours earlier, at 4:17 on a gray Wednesday afternoon, I had pulled into the driveway with lower‑back pain and a head full of plans. Three weeks in Seattle hospitals and my sister’s uncomfortable pull‑out couch had turned my spine into a complaint line. On the way home to Portland, I’d stopped at the little toy store off I‑5, the one in Olympia with the wooden train set in the window and the dusty Yankees pennant above the register.
I bought a rainbow stacker for Emma—she’s three and learning her colors—and a chunky fire truck for Marcus, who thinks anything with wheels is magic. The gift bags sat in the passenger seat next to an envelope with $3,000 in cash. I had withdrawn it at the bank in Seattle before driving south, money I’d been slowly setting aside to fix the south‑facing side of my daughter’s roof.
The shingles were curling, and she’d mentioned leaks last fall. That is what parents do, I told myself as I tucked the envelope into my jacket pocket. We fix things.
We provide. The sky over Portland was the color of wet cement, threatening rain the way it does every March, but holding off for now. I pulled my duffel bag from the trunk.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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