“I’m not going to any retirement community,” I replied, pouring myself coffee. “This is my home.”
“Mom, be reasonable,” Brandon said. “The paperwork is done. We close with the developers next week. You can’t stay here.”
I looked at my son—really looked at him—and saw nothing of Nicholas in his face. Nothing of the boy who had once followed his father through the orchard at dawn, asking endless questions about pollination and pruning. Nothing but a stranger who saw me as an inconvenience to be managed.
“I need my medication from the bathroom,” I said quietly. “And I’d like to take some photos.”
“Sure, Mom,” Melissa agreed, relief evident in her voice. “Take whatever personal items you want. We can send the rest later.”
I moved through my home one last time, touching the worn banister Nicholas had sanded and re-varnished every five years. The quilt my grandmother had made that draped across our bed. The window seat where I’d read stories to my children on rainy afternoons.
In the bathroom, I retrieved my medications, but also slipped my passport and birth certificate from the hidden compartment in the medicine cabinet—the one Nicholas had built when we first worried about burglaries in the late ’80s. In our bedroom closet, behind Nicholas’s collection of flannel shirts that still smelled faintly of him, I retrieved the small fireproof box containing the one thing my children didn’t know about.
When I came downstairs, my purse was heavier, but my heart felt lighter with resolve. Brandon was checking his watch.
“Ready?” he asked. It wasn’t really a question.
I nodded, allowing Melissa to take my arm as if I were already the infirm old woman they wanted me to be.
We drove in Brandon’s rental car, a sleek black SUV with leather seats that stuck to the backs of my legs. I watched my home disappear through the rear window, memorizing the sight of spring buds on the apple trees, the weathered red of our barn, the stone chimney Nicholas had rebuilt the summer before Brandon was born. We drove past Milfield’s small downtown, past the elementary school where I’d volunteered, past the community center where I still taught quilting on Wednesday evenings.
