It happened on a Tuesday.
Garrett poured his coffee, reached for the paper, and then his hand went to his chest. He looked at me with such surprise, as if he’d just remembered something important. And then he was gone, just like that.
A heart attack.
I didn’t ask what he meant.
***
At the cemetery, the wind cut straight through the black dress I wore.
Margaret stood across the open grave, dry-eyed, watching me as if I were a stain on the linen.
***
We hadn’t been back at the house for 10 minutes when my DIL found me in the front room, a sheaf of stapled papers in her hand.
“Get out,” she said, shaking the pages at me. “The house has been in our family trust since before you ever walked through that door. Daddy signed it. Your name isn’t on a single line. You’ve embarrassed our mother’s memory long enough!”
“Get out.”
Daniel walked in carrying my old brown suitcase, the one I’d brought with me the winter before. He set it at my feet without a word.
“Please,” I whispered. “At least let me take his photograph. Just one.”
“No,” Margaret said. “Nothing in this house belongs to you. The trust is very clear.”
I looked at my son-in-law (SIL). He looked at the floor.
“The trust is very clear.”
So I picked up the suitcase, still wearing the same black dress I’d worn to bury my husband, and I walked out the front door of the second home where I’d known love. I had nowhere to go but a trailer by the county road.
Ruth’s old trailer sat at the end of a gravel road. I dragged my suitcase up the warped steps and stood in the kitchen for a long while, just listening to the faucet drip. My sister had been gone for four years, but her dish towels still hung on the oven handle.
I had nowhere to go.
Ruth had left the trailer to me when she passed, and I’d been paying the lot rent ever since out of habit, never imagining I’d need it.
***
The first nights were the hardest. I slept in the housecoat that my high school sweetheart had bought me because it still smelled faintly of his aftershave. I cried in a way I hadn’t cried since Howard’s death.
***
On the third morning, I took my phone and called the mansion. Margaret answered.
“It’s Eleanor,” I said. “Please. I just want the picture from the mantel, the one of him fishing. I’ll pay for the shipping.”
The first nights were the hardest.
“Don’t call here again,” my DIL said.
The line went dead before I could draw a breath.
***
Two days after that, a courier knocked on the trailer door, holding a thin envelope from Daniel’s stationery. When I opened the letter, it said I wasn’t to contact the family or contest anything.
It was said that their father had been confused in his final months and that they wouldn’t tolerate interference.
“Don’t call here again.”
I read it twice, folded it, and put it in the drawer. I didn’t bother writing back. I didn’t have the fight in me, and I wasn’t even sure I had the right.
***
My neighbor, Joyce, came over that Sunday with a tuna casserole.
“Heard you were new,” she said, setting it on the counter as if we’d known each other for years. “I don’t ask questions unless they’re invited.”
“I appreciate that,” I told her.
“My Walter passed in ’09. The first month, I forgot how to eat. So I’m not asking if you’re hungry. I’m just leaving this here.”
I almost cried into the casserole. I didn’t, but it was close.
I didn’t bother writing back.
I started going to the little country church up the road on Wednesdays. Nobody there knew who Garrett had been. They just knew I sang alto and brought a pound cake when it was my turn.
Slowly, I stopped waiting for the phone to ring. I stopped rehearsing what I’d say to Margaret if she ever apologized. I started believing the silence was the rest of my story, and I told myself I could make peace with it.
I stopped waiting for the phone to ring.
