What Eleanor Knew
Walter and I bought the house in 1974 when the neighborhood was still young enough that we knew every family on the block by name and the street trees were thin enough to see through. We paid thirty-one thousand dollars for it and we painted every room ourselves and Walter laid the hardwood in the back bedroom on his hands and knees over a long weekend in August because the floor-layer quoted a price we could not manage that year.
That is the house I am talking about. That is the house my daughter-in-law Bridget has been living in for four years while telling people she takes care of me.
My name is Eleanor Marsh. I am seventy-nine years old. My husband Walter died in 2018 after fifty-one years of marriage and I have been in this house alone, or nearly alone, since then. I say nearly alone because Bridget arrived the following year, in the specific way of a person who suggests the arrangement as a kindness and moves in with the efficiency of someone who has been planning it, and since then I have had someone in the house, though alone and nearly alone have often felt indistinguishable.
I want to be clear about my eyes before I explain anything else.
My vision began to fail in the way that eyes fail at my age, gradually and then not so gradually, and I reached a point where the small print on documents was beyond what I could reliably read. I did not tell Curtis this. My son has a full life and I have spent seventy-nine years not being a burden to the people around me and I was not going to start then.
What I did instead was call Rosalind Pike.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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