The House Evelyn Left Behind
When I came home from the cemetery, there were four people 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, dripping from the hem of my black coat onto the hardwood floor Evelyn Whitmore used to polish every Saturday morning before her hands began to tremble too badly to hold a rag.
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, widow, mother of two, grandmother of one, and for the last ten years of her life, 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 in my living room without me.
My husband, Mark Whitmore, sat in Evelyn’s favorite chair. That was the first betrayal I understood. He had never sat there while she was alive.
Not once. He had called that chair “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 tray of pills on the side table, past the body that had once carried him and raised him and fed him before he became too important to return the favor.
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