My neighbor Dorothy caught me at the bottom of the stairwell on a Tuesday morning, just as I was pulling on my coat and trying to remember whether I had packed my gardening gloves. I was on my way to the garden club meeting, the one I attended every week mostly because Frank had always said I needed at least one place in the world where nobody asked me about bills, doctors, or whether I was eating enough. Dorothy lived across the hall from me.
She was seventy-eight years old, sharp as a tack, and the kind of woman who noticed everything without ever making a performance of noticing it. She had lived in our building for eleven years. She did not gossip.
She did not linger in hallways. She did not ask questions unless she had already thought very carefully about the answer. So when she stepped out of the stairwell door and said my name in a low voice, I stopped.
“Margaret,” she said. “I need to ask you something. And I hope you won’t take offense.”
There was something in her face that made me pull my coat closed more slowly.
“Of course not,” I told her. She glanced once toward the elevator, then toward my apartment door, even though the hallway was empty. Her gray eyes settled back on mine, steady and careful.
“Do you know that your son comes to your home every Monday while you’re out?”
For a second, I thought I had misheard her. Then I laughed. Not because it was funny.
It was the opposite of funny. I laughed because the sentence did not fit anywhere inside the life I understood. “My son?” I said.
“Daniel,” she replied gently, as if there might have been another one. Daniel lived forty minutes away in Crestwood with his wife, Renee, and their two children. He worked long hours at a commercial real estate firm.
He had always been busy, always scheduled, always slightly impatient with small domestic things. He called me some Sundays, visited on holidays, and remembered my birthday about half the time if Patricia reminded him. Daniel was many things, but he was not the sort of man who dropped by on a Monday morning just to see his mother.
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