For three years I kept a spiral notebook on the arm of the recliner beside my mother’s bed, and the morning after her funeral my sister told me that notebook was worthless, that I had been wasting my time, that I had always been Mom’s least favorite anyway. She said it the way you’d mention the weather. Colleen has always been able to say the cruelest thing in the calmest voice, and that morning she stood in our mother’s kitchen with a cup of Eileen’s coffee in her hand and said, “You were the maid, Bridget. Maids don’t inherit.”
I want to tell you the whole thing, because for a while I believed her. That’s the part that still makes my stomach turn. For about six days I believed my own sister when she told me I’d been nothing but hired help to the woman who raised us. And then I remembered the notebook.
My name is Bridget. I’m forty-one years old. I live in the same small town in the middle of this country where my sister and I grew up, the kind of place with one stoplight that only started blinking red about ten years ago, a feed store that’s been in the same family for four generations, and a Methodist church where our mother sang alto in the choir until her voice gave out. Colleen got out. She moved two hours away to the city the week after she turned nineteen and came back for holidays and not always those. I stayed. When you’re the one who stays, you become the one who is called.
And I was called. For three years I was the one who was called.
Our mother, Eileen, was diagnosed the spring I turned thirty-eight. It started slow, the way these things do, a forgotten pot on the stove, a missed church service, a phone call where she asked me the same question four times in ten minutes. My husband Neil noticed before I let myself notice. He’s a patient man, Neil, a diesel mechanic with grease under his nails and the steadiest heart of anyone I’ve ever known, and he was the one who sat me down at our own kitchen table and said, gently, “Bridge, your mom can’t be out there alone anymore.” I cried. Then I did what needed doing.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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