Fifteen days away should have made home feel like relief. Instead, the second I stepped through the front door of my split-level at the end of Cartwright Cul-de-Sac, the air hit me wrong. It smelled like fresh paint and a sweet expensive perfume that wasn’t mine, and under that a faint chemical sharpness I recognized as the particular smell of things being changed in a hurry.
My suitcase rolled over the entry tile and I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes travel the hallway. The coat hooks by the door held jackets I didn’t recognize in sizes that weren’t mine. The small watercolor of Lake Michigan my sister had painted for me, the one that had hung in the hallway for eleven years, was gone.
In its place hung a large rectangular print in muted tones, abstract, the kind of thing that is designed to match a color scheme rather than mean anything. I walked slowly. The living room had been rearranged.
My reading chair, the one with the slight sag on the left arm where I had sat through a thousand evenings, was pushed into the corner at an angle that made it look apologetic. A new cream sofa occupied the center of the room, too pale and too perfect, the kind of furniture that announces its own importance. My book, the one I had left open face-down on the end table when I left for my trip, was gone.
I noticed I was still holding my suitcase handle. I set it down carefully, the way you set things down when you are trying not to make noise, though I was alone in the hallway and there was no one to disturb. Or so I thought.
My name is Carol Whitmore. I am sixty-three years old. I am a retired high school art teacher, a grandmother of one, a widow of nine years, and the owner, on paper and in practice, of a three-bedroom split-level that I bought with my husband Leonard in 1987 and paid off in 2009 and have maintained alone since the cancer took him in the same year I wrote that final mortgage payment.
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