My father texted my mother’s little sister from the recliner at the foot of Mom’s hospice bed, and every message lit up the iPad in my lap. “Once she signs the house over, we’re done pretending,” he wrote. Nine weeks after the funeral, the two of them got married. I brought a gift.
Mom had been sick for fourteen months by then.
Her bed was in the dining room because she couldn’t do the stairs anymore.
I drove down every Friday after my last patient, two and a half hours, and slept on the couch until Sunday night.
Dad had the weekdays.
And Aunt Laura had moved into the guest room in March, “to take some of the load off Jorge.”
That’s how she said it at church.
I thanked her for it. I hugged her in the driveway.
The iPad was Mom’s, but Dad had set it up on his own account so he could fix things when she got confused.
She used it for exactly one thing, a jigsaw app with lighthouses.
That night it was a little after one. Mom was asleep. Dad was across the bed in the recliner, the one that squeaked like a dog toy every time he shifted, and his face was blue from his phone.
The iPad buzzed on my knee.
A gray bubble. From “L.”
“Is she out?”
Then a blue one, from Dad’s side, before I could even think.
“Out cold. You up?”
I looked over at him. He was smiling at his screen.
L again: “I’m so sick of listening to you two through the wall. When is this over.”
Dad typed. The recliner squeaked. The iPad buzzed.
“Lawyer comes Tuesday. Once she signs the house over, we’re done pretending. Keep making her the soup.”
The soup.
Laura made Mom chicken pastina every night. Mom said it was the only thing that stayed down.
I scrolled up. I shouldn’t have.
It went back to the October BEFORE the diagnosis.
There were photos. I’m not going to describe them.
The house was Mom’s. Her parents built it in 1971 and left it to her, only her, and Dad had been “handling the paperwork” since spring.
I wanted to throw the goddamn iPad at his head.
Instead I turned it face down on the blanket.
Mom moved her hand in her sleep and found my wrist.
Across the bed, my father laughed through his nose at something on his phone. Then he looked up.
“You should get some sleep, kiddo,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You too.”
I didn’t tell Mom.
Every weekend I sat beside her with it in my mouth.
But she weighed ninety-four pounds, and she still asked Laura to brush her hair, and she still called Dad “my guy” when he came in with her pills.
I couldn’t hand her that. Not with what she had left.
So on Tuesday I watched her sign.
The lawyer was a nice man with a bad cold who kept apologizing for it. Dad held the clipboard steady for her. Laura stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel on her shoulder.
“It’s just so things stay simple, Mir,” Dad said.
“I know, honey,” Mom said.
I held the cap of the pen.
She died five weeks later, on a Sunday morning, while Dad and Laura were out “getting groceries.”
At the funeral lunch, Laura sat in Mom’s chair.
Thirty-three days after that, Dad took me to the steakhouse on Route 2 and ordered for both of us.
“Kaitlyn, this is going to be hard to hear,” he said. “Grief does strange things to people. Your aunt and I leaned on each other, and somewhere in there it turned into something.”
“Something,” I said.
“We’re getting married. September. Small, just family.”
Laura reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “She’d want us to be happy, sweetie. You KNOW she would.”
I let her hold it.
“Congratulations,” I said.
Dad never asked about the iPad.
After the funeral he told me to recycle it with her old phone, and I told him I had.
I hadn’t.
I spent the next nine weeks on a box.
The wedding was at the Elks hall in Lorain, the same room where my parents threw their thirtieth anniversary.
Laura wore cream. Dad wore the navy suit he’d buried Mom in front of.
Forty-one people came. Most of them had been at the funeral. Most of them hugged the bride.
Uncle Armando gave a toast about second chances. People clapped.
I waited through the cake.
Then I picked the box up from under my chair and carried it to the head table myself.
It was flat, about the size of a cutting board, wrapped in plain white paper. Heavier than it looked.
Laura saw me coming and put a hand on her chest. “Oh, Kait. You didn’t have to.”
“I did,” I said.
Dad pulled the ribbon. Laura lifted the lid.
She looked down.
The smile stayed on her face one more second, like it hadn’t been told yet.
Then she made a sound I had never heard a grown woman make.
Uncle Armando’s fork hit his plate. The DJ cut the music halfway through a song.
Dad stood up so fast his chair went over behind him.
“WHERE DID YOU GET THAT,” he said.
He already knew where.
He looked at the box. Then at me. Then at forty-one people who had all gone quiet at once.
“Read the card, Dad,” I said. “OUT LOUD.”
The head table
Laura was still holding the lid. She held it up in front of her like a tray.
Inside the box, under glass, was a jigsaw puzzle. Five hundred pieces, glued flat, every seam still showing. A picture of a text thread.
A gray bubble from “L,” 11:52 p.m., April 19: “Does she suspect anything?”
Under it, a blue one: “She can barely work the iPad lol.”
The frame was white. The kind you buy for a wedding picture.
There was a card tucked into the corner of the box. Dad looked at it a long time. Forty-one people were watching him, and my father has always done what a room expects of him, so he picked it up and opened it.
“Mom made this one herself,” he read.
Then he stopped. His mouth stayed open on the next word.
He folded the card in half and put it in the inside pocket of the navy suit.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We’re going to take a minute, everybody.”
Nobody moved. Somebody’s kid asked for more cake and got shushed.
Uncle Armando had his napkin in his fist. He was looking at the puzzle, then at me.
“Jorge,” he said. “What does that mean, she made it herself?”
Lighthouses
Dad bought the iPad the first winter, after the second round, when Mom stopped being able to hold a book open.
He set it up at the kitchen table while she watched from the dining room. I was there. It was a Saturday.
“I’m putting it on mine, Mir,” he said. “That way if you get stuck, I can fix it from my phone.”
“Look at you,” Mom said. “My guy.”
People at church called him a saint that year. A woman I didn’t know stopped me in the parking lot after Mass to tell me how lucky we were. He drove the pills. He learned the morphine schedule. He built the plywood ramp off the side door himself, and he was proud of that ramp, and he showed it to everybody who came to visit.
Uncle Armando took her to her Wednesday infusions the whole first year, because Dad “had a lot on.” He played the oldies station too loud and Mom let him. She said it was the only part of the week that felt like a car ride and not an appointment.
The app was called something like Jigsaw Daily. It had lighthouses. Hundreds of them, from all over, and she did them in order.
Portland Head. Split Rock. A red one on Lake Michigan she kept saying she’d go see when this was over.
She did them with one finger. Slowly. Some Fridays I’d sit on the edge of the bed after my drive and hold the iPad up for her so her arm didn’t get tired.
One Friday in April I leaned over to see how far she’d gotten, and she swiped the screen so fast she almost knocked it out of my hand.
There’d been a tab at the bottom I’d never paid attention to. She was on it. Then she wasn’t. Then it was the red lighthouse again, half done.
“I’m cheating,” she said. “Don’t look.”
I laughed. I let it go. Why would I not let it go?
That was the iPad Dad told me to recycle.
I took it home in my scrub bag the day of the funeral. I put it in airplane mode in the car before I even left the driveway, because the one thing I knew for sure about that iPad was that it belonged to my father’s phone.
At the head table, Dad had his hand flat over his jacket pocket.
“It’s a joke,” he said to Armando. “She’s upset. It’s her idea of a joke.”
Armando said, “Then read me the rest of the joke.”
Dorota Vermeulen
The week after the steakhouse I took a half day and drove to Elyria to see a lawyer of my own.
Her name was Dorota Vermeulen. Her office was upstairs from a tax place. She charged me two hundred and fifty dollars to listen for an hour, and she listened.
I told her about the house. 1971, Mom’s parents, left only to her. I told her about the texts and the Tuesday.
She pulled the quitclaim up on her screen before I’d finished talking. It was already public. Anybody can look.
“Your mother signed this,” she said.
“I know. I was there.”
“I can see you were there.” She turned the screen toward me. “That’s your name on the witness line.”
It was. Under Mom’s. The nice man with the cold had asked if I’d mind, since I was standing right there anyway, and I’d taken the pen from Mom and signed it and given it back to her and put the cap on.
I had forgotten. I’d honestly forgotten.
“Was she confused that day?” Dorota said.
“No.”
“Was she on anything that would make her confused?”
“She was always on something. She knew what she was signing.”
Dorota took her glasses off. “Then I would be taking your money. You’d be standing up in front of a judge and saying your mother didn’t understand a page you swore she did.”
She said she could at least request the closing file from Mr. Hurley, the lawyer with the cold, so I’d know exactly what was filed and when. I said fine. I paid for that too.
Three days later my father called me at work. I saw the name on my phone between patients and let it ring out, and he called back, and I took it in the supply closet.
“You got a lawyer sniffing around Hurley?” he said. “Kaitlyn. You were sitting RIGHT THERE. You signed it.”
“I know.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Nothing, Dad.”
He breathed for a second. The recliner was squeaking. He was in it. I could hear the dining room around him, the empty space where the bed had been.
“Where’s your mother’s iPad?” he said.
“I told you. I recycled it.”
“Funny,” he said. “Find My says it’s at your apartment, kiddo.”
Lorain County Recorder
He didn’t push. That was what scared me. He said “Okay” like I’d told him the weather, and he hung up.
I sat on the floor of the supply closet next to the boxes of prophy paste and did the math. If that iPad ever touched wifi, he could wipe it from his phone in a minute. If I’d turned it on in the car the day of the funeral, it would already be gone.
So it never touched wifi. I charged it at night on my kitchen counter with the router unplugged, like an idiot, and then I’d plug the router back in for the morning.
That same week Uncle Armando called me.
“Your dad says you’re making trouble,” he said.
“I’m not making anything.”
“Kait. Listen to me. He did fourteen months. I watched him do it. Whatever’s on paper, let him have it. If you can’t stand up there in September and be happy for him, don’t come.”
“I’m coming,” I said. “I’m bringing a gift.”
“Then bring something nice,” he said, and I could hear Aunt Sabrina in the background asking who it was.
Mr. Hurley’s file came on a Friday, a thick envelope forwarded by Dorota’s office with a sticky note on it that said only FYI — see last page.
The quitclaim was in there, Mom to Dad, recorded the Thursday after she signed.
The last page was something else. A second deed.
Grantor: Jorge A. Fernandez.
Grantees: Jorge A. Fernandez and Laura M. Coleman, as joint tenants with right of survivorship.
The house my grandparents built. Half to her, the whole thing to whoever lived longest.
I looked at the date he signed it three times, because I wanted it to be a mistake.
He signed it on a Wednesday in June. Mr. Hurley notarized it in our kitchen.
Mom was in the next room. She died eleven days later.
My Puzzles
I had a plan for the box by then, sort of. I was going to have the “done pretending” message printed, big, and framed. I had a photo of the iPad screen on my own phone. I’d even picked the frame.
But I couldn’t make myself order it.
It was the third week of August. A Tuesday, after work. I was sitting at my kitchen table with the iPad in airplane mode and a bowl of cereal I wasn’t eating, and I wasn’t looking at the texts. I’d stopped looking at the texts. I’d opened the jigsaw app instead, because it was the only thing on there that was still just hers.
The red lighthouse was where she’d left it. Two hundred and twelve pieces in out of three hundred.
There were four tabs along the bottom. Daily. Lighthouses. Stats.
My Puzzles.
I touched it.
You could make a puzzle out of any picture on the iPad. The app asked you to name it. There were four in there, and the names were in Mom’s typing, which by spring was all lowercase with no apostrophes because her thumb couldn’t find them.
The first one was called 4-19.
I opened it. The picture slid in, the whole thing, before it broke itself into pieces.
A gray bubble. “Does she suspect anything?”
A blue one. “She can barely work the iPad lol.”
Under it the app said: Solved 11 times. Best time 38:40.
I put my spoon down on the table.
The second one was 4-30. Laura: “She called you her guy again today. I wanted to die.”
The third one was called soup. Dad: “Just keep making it. She thinks you’re a saint.”
She’d done that one six times.
She knew in April. She took screenshots of my father’s texts on the iPad he’d set up to keep an eye on her, and she turned them into puzzles, and then she deleted the screenshots so nothing would show up on his phone. And she sat in that bed and put them back together with one finger while the two of them were in the kitchen.
Then she swiped back to the lighthouses when anyone leaned over.
I’m cheating. Don’t look.
The fourth one was made on a Wednesday in late May. Two days before I sat in the dark with that iPad on my knee. The picture was one blue bubble, Dad to L.
“Kait comes Friday. Be normal.”
She’d named it dont tell kait.
Under it the app said: Solved 0 times.
Armando’s reading glasses
“Give me the card, Jorge,” Uncle Armando said.
“Sit down, Mando.”
“Give me the card.”
“This is my wedding,” Dad said. “This is my WEDDING, and she walks up here with that, in front of the whole church, in front of Father Tomasz, and you want to stand there and take her side?”
“I asked you for a card.”
Laura put the lid down on the table. She reached into Dad’s jacket like she’d been reaching into it for a year, and she took the card out and held it across the cake to Armando.
Dad said “Laura” once. That was all he said to her.
Armando put his reading glasses on. He read it the way he gave the toast, loud enough for the back tables.
“Dad and Laura. Mom made this one herself, on her iPad, on April 19. It’s in her jigsaw app under the name she gave it. She put it together eleven times. She made three more. The last one is called ‘don’t tell Kait.’ She knew. She signed anyway. Congratulations. Kaitlyn.”
He folded his glasses up and didn’t say anything else.
Laura said, “April?”
Dad said, “She couldn’t work that thing.”
“April, Jorge?”
“She couldn’t WORK it, she couldn’t hold a fork by April, she needed help to go to the goddamn bathroom.” He turned on me. “And you. You. You sat at that bed every weekend for five weeks, and you knew, and you didn’t say one word to her. You put your name on that deed. You held her pen. So don’t you come in here in my brother’s hall and act like you’re better than me.”
I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t wrong about any of it.
“It’s done,” he said. “It’s legal. The house is in our names and there’s not one thing anybody in this room can do about it. She was dying. She was dying anyway.”
Laura sat down in her cream dress. She looked at the puzzle.
“I made her soup every night,” she said. “I made it every single night.”
Nobody answered her. She picked up a napkin and folded it in half, then again.
“Did she hate me?” she said. She said it to me.
Uncle Armando stood up. He put his hand on Aunt Sabrina’s shoulder and she got her purse.
“I drove her every Wednesday for a year,” he said to Dad. “And you let me get up there and talk about second chances.”
He walked out. Sabrina walked out after him. Then a table of Mom’s cousins from Vermilion got up, and then people I didn’t know, and nobody said goodbye to the bride.
Dad picked his chair up off the floor. He didn’t sit in it.
“Get out,” he said to me. “And don’t you come near that house. Not for her clothes. Not for anything. You hear me?”
Her hairbrush was in that house. Her winter coat. The bed rail she used to hold on to. Every picture of her I didn’t already have.
“I know, honey,” I said.
I left the box on the head table, under Laura’s hands, and walked out past the DJ.
Friday, 1:10 a.m.
It’s October now. I still don’t drive anywhere on Fridays.
Dorota sent me a bill for the file and a short note that said she was sorry about my mother, and I paid it and kept the note.
Armando calls on Sundays. He doesn’t bring up the house and neither do I.
Tonight I got off work and came home and fell asleep on the couch in my scrubs, and when I woke up it was a little after one.
The iPad was on the blanket where I’d left it. Airplane mode. Forty percent.
Nothing buzzed. Nothing lit up on its own.
I opened the app. I didn’t go to My Puzzles. I don’t go there anymore.
The red lighthouse was still two hundred and twelve pieces in.
I did it the way she did, with one finger. The rocks first, then the water, then the white rail around the top. It took me almost two hours.
There was one piece left. The light.
I put it in.
If this one got to you, sit a while with somebody you love and let them show you what they’re working on.
For more messy family drama and long-overdue reckonings, read “My Husband Called Me Brainless Over the Grill, Then Said Monday Works for Him” and “His Mother Knelt on My Welcome Mat Holding the Ring I Gave Back”. And for another family member who learns that actions have consequences, see “Kirsten Asked My Grandmother to Sew a Boutique’s Label Into Her Dress”.
