The House Evelyn Left Behind
When I came home from the cemetery, four people were sitting in my living room as if they had been waiting for my grief to walk through the door. My husband. My son.
My sister-in-law. And a lawyer I had never seen before. The February rain had followed me inside.
My funeral shoes left dark wet prints across the entryway, and for a second that was all I could look at. Those little marks. That evidence that I had entered my own home like an intruder.
I had just watched my mother-in-law lowered into the frozen ground. Evelyn Margaret Whitmore, seventy-nine years old. For the last ten years of her life, she had been the person I washed, fed, dressed, lifted, medicated, comforted, and carried through every small humiliation illness can invent.
I had held her hand while the cancer took what the strokes had left behind. I had slept in a chair beside her bed so often that the shape of my body had become part of the cushion. I had learned the sound of her pain before she made a noise.
And now, before my coat had even come off, my family had gathered without me. My husband Mark sat in Evelyn’s favorite chair. He had never sat there while she was alive.
Not once. He had called it “Mom’s throne” with a laugh, as if affection could be performed from a distance. He had walked past it for years without stopping, past the woman curled under a blanket, past the pills on the side table, past the body that had carried him before he became too important to return the favor.
Now he sat there like a man claiming a throne after a funeral. Ethan, my son, sat on the couch with his elbows on his knees, twenty-four years old and staring at his hands. Mark’s sister Paige sat beside him with a leather folder in her lap.
She was still wearing the sunglasses from the cemetery, though the sky had been gray and the rain steady. She wore them now too, indoors, in the dim living room where I had changed Evelyn’s bandages at two in the morning more times than I could count. The fourth person was thin and pale in a gray suit.
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