I return the refrigerator and the washer and dryer, on the theory that appliances become part of a house. Rosalina’s answer was two sentences long and I have it framed, metaphorically. Nothing further ever came.
Rebecca has not spoken to me since the police call and I do not expect her to and I have made my peace with that in a way I did not think I would.
And I live here now.
I Rent a One-Bedroom in Delphine’s Building and I Furnished It Out of a Storage Unit on Thomas Road
Eleven hundred and forty a month. Second floor, east-facing, a little balcony that gets the morning.
The living room set is in it. The dining table doesn’t fit, so I sold it and I use a small round one from a consignment place.
The curtains were made for tall windows and mine are short, soDelphine’s niece took them up for me and they look wrong and I don’t care.
The coffee maker is on my counter. The Italian one with the brass handle. Eleven hundred and eighty dollars, which is an insane amount of money for a coffee maker, and I use it every single morning at six-fifteen, and that is the one object out of all thirteen that I would go back into that house for.
I walk two and a half miles at six-forty before it gets hot. I’m in two book clubs now. In March I got on an airplane by myself and flew to Chicago for nine days and stayed with my sister and went to the cemetery where Arthur is and told him the whole thing.
I was not tired. The flight is three hours and forty minutes.
I See My Grandchildren Twice a Month and That Is theOnly Part of This I Had to Fight For
Emily is eleven. Jack is nine.
I get them every other Saturday, from ten until four, and once a month for dinner, and that arrangement took four months and two conversations with Daniel to build.
The first Saturday I had them — in March — Jack got out of the car and looked around my apartment and said:
“Gram, this is our couch.”
And I said: “It’s my couch, buddy. It always was. Want to sit on it?”
And he did.
Emily is old enough to have figured out most of it, and she’s angry at everybody, and she took it out on me for about three visits and then stopped. We don’t talk about it. Her mother is her mother and I have never said one word about Rebecca to those children and I never will.
Jack still gets in my bedon Saturday mornings and watches cartoons on the little television in my bedroom.
That TV came out of that house. It’s on my list, line six.
What I’d Tell Any Widow Who Just Got Asked to Move in With Her Children
Three things. The third one is the one that actually matters.
One: keep the receipts, and keep them in your own name. Everything I have in my apartment today I have because a woman who was teased for fifty-one years about keeping receipts for bread kept receipts for a refrigerator. When an officer sat down at a kitchen table in Scottsdale with my blue folder, there was nothing to argue about. Not because I’d been clever — I wasn’t being clever, I was being the way I’ve been since 1973. But if you are buying things for a household that is not legally yours, put the purchase in your name,register the warranty in your name, and put the paper in one folder in one drawer. It is the difference between a sad story and a moving truck.
Two: before you sell your house, read what they put in front of you at the closing table. In August of 2022, four months after I buried my husband, my son handed me a gift letter at a title company and I signed it without reading one line, because I was sixty-nine and grieving and because he’s my son. That letter said I had no interest in that property and expected nothing back. Thirty-eight thousand dollars, gone, legally, correctly, with my own signature on it. If you are putting money into a child’s home — and most of us will — have somebody who is not in your family read the papers out loud to you before you sign. One afternoon. Four hundred dollars.
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