I wake at six, whether midnight was kind or stingy. Forty years of bells and freshmen and chalk dust trained my body to rise before the sun and steal the quiet hour. Even five years into retirement, the clock inside me keeps good time.
The Tri‑Cities are still sleeping when I pad into my kitchen—Pasco’s streetlights burn like low moons, a bus whispers past Court Street, the Columbia lies in its green bed like a giant muscle at rest. I set the kettle on, pinch coffee into the press, and watch the sky find its first color. My phone buzzes across the counter, the name on the screen my favorite and my trouble.
“Morning, Mom,” my son says. “Sorry it’s early. Can you pick Lamont up from the clinic at eleven?”
“Good morning, sweetheart,” I answer.
“Of course.”
“You’re the best.” In his voice, relief masquerades as gratitude. “Beatrice has a last‑minute supplier call out of Milan, and I’ve got Tokyo at nine. The day’s a mess.”
“It often is,” I say, moving my nine‑o’clock meeting with my financial adviser in my mind like a chess piece.
Lists stack themselves on the table. Coffee blooms. The city exhales.
My name is Harriet Plimpton—once Professor Plimpton, WSU Tri‑Cities, Department of English. I taught survey and seminar and, for three glorious semesters, a detective fiction class that lured engineers who wanted to talk motive and method as if the human heart ran on formulas. I have one son, a beautiful boy who grew into a man in an expensive suit, who married a woman whose confidence enters a room ten seconds before she does.
As a wedding gift, I gave them a house in Hillcrest—a big, bright, West‑Coast Greek Revival with white columns Beatrice called “architectural.”
I never re‑deeded the house. At first, the delay was the usual drift of life; then “we’re family” became habit, then habit became the way we looked past a cliff and insisted it was a line on a map. At ten‑fifty I pull into the clinic lot.
When Lamont appears, his smile fills the doorway before his wheelchair does. “Grandma Harriet!”
“Hey, champ.” I kiss his forehead and breathe him in; he still smells faintly like the shampoo we picked together. “How’d it go?”
“Dr.
Reed said I crushed it. I balanced thirty seconds on the bars.” He sits a little taller when he says it, as if the chair were a thing he pilots, not a thing that holds him. “That’s huge,” I tell him.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
