The funeral flowers had barely wilted when the phone calls began. I was standing in my kitchen on a gray Tuesday morning, three weeks after we buried my husband, Russell, watching steam coil off a cup of coffee I couldn’t bring myself to drink. The ceramic mug—white with a faded red heart and the words World’s Best Grandma—had been a Christmas gift from my granddaughter, Kathleen, years ago.
It felt foreign in my hands now, the way everything did: the house, my reflection in the hallway mirror, even my own voice when I answered the relentless calls from my children. “Mom, we need to talk about the house.”
It was my son, Donald. His voice carried that familiar tone of barely contained impatience, the same one he’d used as a teenager when he wanted money for concert tickets or gas.
Only now, at thirty-two, he wasn’t asking. I set the mug down on the kitchen island without taking a sip and looked out through the window over the sink at our quiet Midwestern cul-de-sac. An American flag stirred lazily on the neighbor’s porch, the one Russell used to joke was more punctual than any alarm clock every Fourth of July.
“Good morning to you too, Donald,” I said. “Don’t start with me, Mom. Lisa and I have been talking about your situation, and frankly, it’s not sustainable.
That house is way too big for you alone. The mortgage payments—”
“There is no mortgage,” I said, my voice flat, purely factual. Russell had paid it off five years earlier, but I’d never mentioned that to the children.
They’d assumed, and I’d let them. There was a pause, then a short laugh—sharp, dismissive, the same sharp edge Russell sometimes had in his voice, though my husband had usually wielded it with affection. Donald wielded it like a weapon.
“Mom, please,” he said. “Dad’s pension barely covers your medications. We all know the financial strain you’re under.”
I walked closer to the window above the sink.
The garden Russell and I had tended for twenty-three years was beginning to blur at the edges: roses that needed pruning, an herb patch gone wild where basil and thyme tangled together. These had once been our weekend projects, little rituals of care; now they stood like monuments to everything I’d lost. “Your concern is touching,” I said, catching my reflection in the glass.
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