PART 1: Strangers Under Walter’s Roof
At sixty-eight, I came home from two weeks in Ireland and found fifteen people sleeping in my living room.
It was almost midnight on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. My flight from Dublin had been delayed twice. By the time the cab dropped me at the curb, all I wanted was a cup of chamomile tea and my own bed. The porch light was off, which was strange, because I always leave it on a timer. I fumbled for my key in the dark, turned the lock, and pushed the door open with my hip.
The smell hit me first. Cold pizza, wet dog, and something sour, like beer left out too long. Then my eyes adjusted to the glow of the streetlamp through the front windows, and I saw them.
Air mattresses covered nearly every inch of my living room floor. There were sleeping bags, quilts, and a pink plaid blanket I had never seen before. Two teenage girls lay curled together under my mother’s crocheted afghan. A little boy in a red sweatshirt was sprawled across a sofa cushion that had been pulled onto the floor. A golden retriever lifted its head from the rug, looked at me with mild interest, and put it back down.
Suitcases were stacked against the bottom of the staircase like sandbags. Sneakers were scattered across the hallway runner. Someone’s phone charger was plugged in behind my reading lamp, the cord stretched tight across the room.
And in the brown leather recliner by the fireplace, a heavyset man with a beard was snoring with his mouth open, one sock half off his foot. It was Walter’s recliner. No one had sat in it since the day I buried him three years ago.
I looked at the mantel. For three years, that mantel had held our life together. Our wedding picture. Walter holding Rachel on her first day of kindergarten. The two of us on the dock at Lake George the summer before his diagnosis. Now there was only a stack of board games and a half-empty bottle of wine. The photographs were gone.
I recognized a few of the faces. The bearded man in Walter’s chair was one of Kyle’s cousins, Greg, I thought, or maybe Craig. I had met him once, at my daughter’s wedding eleven years ago. The rest were Brenners too, I assumed, though I couldn’t have told you their names if my life depended on it.
I did not scream. I want that on the record, because of what people said about me later. I stood there in my navy wool coat with my suitcase handle still in my hand. Then I quietly backed into the hallway and took out my phone.
I stood beneath the single hallway light, the phone pressed to my ear, and stared through the doorway at a room full of sleeping strangers while it rang. Once. Twice. Five times.
“Mom?” Rachel’s voice was thick with sleep. “Is everything okay? You’re not supposed to be back until Tuesday.”
“My flight was changed. Rachel, why are there people sleeping in my house?”
Silence. Then a long sigh, the kind she used to give me at sixteen when I asked where she’d been.
“Okay. Don’t freak out. Diane’s house had a plumbing disaster right before Thanksgiving. A pipe burst, and the whole downstairs flooded. Everyone was already flying in, and they had nowhere to go. You were gone anyway. I figured you wouldn’t mind.”
“You figured I wouldn’t mind.”
“Mom, it’s just a few more days. They’re leaving Wednesday. Please, please don’t make a scene. Kyle’s family already thinks—” She stopped herself.
“Thinks what?”
“Nothing. Just go to bed, okay? We’ll talk in the morning.”
She hung up before I could answer.
I was still holding the phone when a door opened upstairs. A woman came down the staircase, picking her way around the suitcases, and I realized two things at once. It was Diane Brenner, my daughter’s mother-in-law. And she was wearing my lavender bathrobe.
“Margaret!” She said it the way you’d greet a neighbor at the grocery store. Her blonde curls were pinned up, and she still had on a trace of red lipstick. “Oh, you’re early! Could you keep your voice down? The little ones just went down an hour ago.”
“You’re wearing my robe.”
She glanced down as if she’d forgotten. “Oh, this? It was hanging on the bathroom door. I hope that’s all right. I’ve been in the master. The mattress in the guest room is murder on my back. You don’t mind taking the guest room for a few nights, do you? You’re so much more flexible than I am.”
I had spent nine hours on a plane. I had spent two weeks lighting candles for my husband in old stone churches. I had no words for what I was feeling, so I said nothing at all. I walked past her into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
That’s when I saw the folder.
It was a thick manila folder sitting on the counter beside the coffee maker, with a paper clip on the front. Normally I would never read something that wasn’t mine. But the label on the tab said 14 Birchwood Lane, and 14 Birchwood Lane is my address.
Inside was a professional home appraisal, dated nine days earlier. It had photographs of my kitchen, my bathrooms, and my backyard. There was a glossy brochure for a place called Sunrise Pines Senior Living. Clipped to it was an intake form with my name already typed at the top.
And on the very first page, stuck at an angle, was a yellow sticky note in looping handwriting I didn’t recognize.
Listing by January. Closing by spring. R. will sign as POA.
I read it three times. R. was Rachel. POA meant power of attorney.
I had never given my daughter power of attorney over anything.
