The Lake House
At Thanksgiving dinner, my son, who had made himself a wealthy man, smiled at me across the table and asked, “Mom, how are you enjoying the lake house?”
I looked at him in complete bewilderment. “What lake house? I’ve never received anything.”
The room went silent. My daughter in law rose slowly from her chair, her face gone gray. And without a word, my son took out his phone and opened the transfer records and began checking each entry, one by one, until he found the truth that had been hidden from both of us for two years.
“Mom, how are you enjoying the lake house?”
He asked it standing beside my Thanksgiving table with a bottle of sparkling cider in one hand and a bakery box in the other, and for a moment I genuinely thought I had misheard him.
“What lake house?”
David’s smile stayed on his face a second too long. Then it slid off.
“The house on Willow Lake. The one I bought for you. Two years ago.”
My fingers tightened around the serving spoon. “David, I don’t own a lake house.”
“Yes, you do. I put the deed in your name twenty five months ago.”
“I think I’d remember someone giving me a house.”
His wife, Victoria, had been taking off her camel colored coat by the door. She stopped, one arm still in a sleeve.
David looked from me to her and back. “I also send you fifteen hundred dollars a month.”
My throat closed. “You send me money?”
“On the first business day of every month. For two years.”
“David. I have never received a single payment.”
Victoria picked up her phone. “I need to check something in the kitchen,” she said, and she left the room before either of us could say another word.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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