framed as concern for my convenience, always returning to a property that was worth approximately nine hundred thousand dollars in the current market.
“It means they don’t have to worry,” I said. “Not about me. About themselves.”
Thomas nodded slowly.
“That’s the most common version,” he said.
I heard the cars in the driveway. Three doors, then six, then the sound of children, which I had not been prepared for. I had been thinking about my three children as they existed in my memory of
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<p>the preceding year, the texted responses and the voicemails and the call in which Michael had told me to stop reaching out when I was lonely or scared and to figure it out myself. I had not been</p>
<p>thinking about the grandchildren, who were five in total and who bore no responsibility for any of it.</p>
<p>I went to the front door and opened it before anyone knocked.</p>
<p>They were arranged on the porch in a loose cluster, the adults in front, the children behind them in</p>
<p>coats. Jennifer was forty-four, and she had Richard’s coloring and my habit of holding her chin slightly elevated when she was uncertain about a situation. Michael was forty-one, broad across</p>
<p>the shoulders, wearing the expression he had worn since adolescence when he expected to be told something he did not want to hear. Lisa was thirty-eight, the youngest, and she looked,</p>
<p>standing slightly to the side of her siblings, like someone who had been persuaded to be present and was now reconsidering.</p>
<p>Their spouses, David and Carla and Tom, stood behind them in various states of awareness that this was not an ordinary family Christmas visit.</p>
<p>The grandchildren looked at me with the frank curiosity of children who have not yet learned to manage their expressions around complicated situations.</p>
<p>“Come in,” I said.</p>
<p>They came in.</p>
<p>I watched them move through the front hall, registering changes I had made in three months. The locks, obviously, though those they had already encountered. The security panel by the door,</p>
<p>which was new. The absence of the photograph of the four of us, Jennifer, Michael, Lisa, and me, that had hung in the entryway for fifteen years and that I had moved to a box in the bedroom closet in October without ceremony.</p>
<p>Jennifer noticed the empty wall. I saw her notice it and choose not to say anything.</p>
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