I had lived in the same house on Oleander Street in Savannah, Georgia, for fifty-one years. My husband Gerald and I had painted those walls together, planted the magnolia in the front yard, and raised two children in those rooms. Gerald passed seven years ago, quietly in his sleep, the way a good man deserves to go.
After that, the house became mine alone, and in time I made my peace with that. I was not a lonely woman. I want to make that clear from the start.
I had my garden, my Wednesday book club, my neighbor Pauline, who brought me pimento cheese and preserves every October, and my cat Admiral, who slept on Gerald’s pillow and pretended not to care about me while following me from room to room. I had remarkable health, the doctors always said, for a woman of my age. My mind was sharp.
My hands were steady. I drove myself to the grocery store, balanced my own checkbook, and had just finished reading Middlemarch for the third time. What I had less of, in those years after Gerald, was family warmth, and that absence had a name: Linda.
My daughter was fifty-eight years old and had always occupied the most private corner of my heart as a difficult person to love. Not impossible, never impossible, but difficult. She had her father’s stubbornness without his kindness, and my practicality without my patience.
She had married Craig Holloway twenty-six years ago, a man who smiled too wide and listened too little. They had one daughter, Ashley, who at thirty-two had learned to perform affection the way her parents had taught her, when it was useful. I had noticed things over the years.
I noticed that Craig had asked twice in one year whether I had updated my will. I noticed that Ashley had begun referring to my house as the property on Oleander in a tone suggesting she was already mentally dividing it. I noticed that Linda had stopped asking about my garden, my book club, or my cat and had started asking, with increasing frequency, whether I had considered assisted living options.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
