My uncle Garland used to stand in my grandmother’s kitchen and price her house out loud, because the whole family was sure her hearing aids were dead. “Three-forty, easy, once she’s in the ground,” he told my aunt, three feet from her chair. Grandma kept writing in her crossword. She heard every word, and she kept count.
She had more money than everyone at her table put together, and the house was just the piece you could see from the road.
Every relative had a number in mind.
Uncle Garland and Aunt Sharon had already spent theirs.
I was the battery girl.
Every Sunday I drove out to her place in Muncie with a fresh card of the tiny orange-tabbed ones from the pharmacy.
“Don’t waste your money, Bri,” she’d say. “These things quit on me back in March.”
“Then I’ll keep buying them till they change their mind,” I said.
She’d snort and hold her head still while I swapped them.
“When your uncle’s here, I like them quiet anyway,” she said once.
I laughed. I thought it was a joke.
I promised her I’d come every Sunday, no matter what.
I never missed. NOT ONCE.
Uncle Garland started showing up on Sundays too, right around her eighty-fourth birthday.
He never brought groceries.
He brought Aunt Sharon and a tape measure.
Aunt Sharon measured the front windows while Grandma sat right there in her blue recliner, doing the crossword in pen.
“These drapes come down day one,” she said. “They smell like soup.”
Grandma didn’t look up.
“Relax, she can’t hear a damn thing,” Uncle Garland said.
To prove it, he bent over her chair and said, “ROSEMARY. YOU. WANT. TEA?” right into her face, the way you’d talk to a dog on a porch.
Grandma blinked up at him. “What’s that, honey?”
He straightened up and grinned at his wife. “See? Deaf as a fence post.”
I wanted to throw his keys in the creek.
Grandma caught my eye around his elbow.
She winked.
I figured she was being a good sport.
It got worse every month after that.
They fought over her dining set in front of her.
They fought over her rings.
At Thanksgiving, Aunt Sharon took Grandma’s wrist, flipped it over, and squinted at her watch like a pawnbroker.
“That’s real gold,” she said. “I’m calling it. That’s MINE.”
“You can’t call dibs on a living woman’s watch,” I said.
“Watch me, sweetheart.”
Grandma filled in fourteen down and tapped it twice with her pen.
At Christmas, Uncle Garland brought along a buddy of his who sold houses.
They walked through every room with their shoes on while Grandma ate her pie.
The buddy asked if the old lady was going to be a problem.
“Her? She doesn’t even know you’re here,” Uncle Garland said.
Grandma asked me for more whipped cream.
Then in January I heard the worst thing he ever said.
He was at the sink with his back to her. I was drying her mugs. Grandma was behind him with her crossword, maybe three feet away.
“I’m not paying one dime for a home,” he said. “Three-forty, easy, once she’s in the ground.”
Aunt Sharon laughed. “Then let her go right there in that chair. Cheaper.”
Grandma turned a page.
My hands shook so bad I dumped the new batteries all over the counter.
Uncle Garland watched me chase them.
“Why do you even bother?” he said. “Those things don’t work. She can’t hear you either, kid.”
“She hears me FINE,” I said.
“Sure she does.”
I sat in my car in her driveway and cried until the windows fogged up.
She died in February.
In her sleep, in the blue recliner, the crossword on her lap.
It wrecked me.
I’d bought her a fresh card of batteries that Saturday. It’s still in my glove box.
Eleven days after we buried her, her lawyer called the family down to his office.
Nine of us showed up.
Uncle Garland wore a suit I’d never seen. Aunt Sharon had fresh nails.
My mom held my hand in the elevator like I was ten again.
The conference room had one long table.
On it sat eight envelopes and eight small boxes, lined up straight, each one labeled with a typed name.
I counted twice.
EIGHT.
There were nine of us.
Aunt Sharon counted too. Then she looked right at me and smiled.
“Looks like somebody got cut,” she said.
My cousin Demetrius told her to knock it off. She didn’t.
The lawyer, Mr. Haas, came in with a folder under his arm and a grin he couldn’t seem to wipe off.
“Please. Everybody sit,” he said.
Uncle Garland was already in the big chair at the far end.
“Let’s move this along,” he said. “We’ve got a realtor at the house at four.”
My mom made a sound like she’d been slapped.
“Garland,” she said. “She’s been gone eleven days.”
“And the house has sat empty eleven days, Leslie. Pipes freeze.”
Mr. Haas let that sit. He kept grinning.
Then he turned to me.
“Briana,” he said. “She left you something different. It isn’t on this table.”
Aunt Sharon laughed out loud.
“Of course it isn’t,” she said. “She got the batteries.”
Uncle Garland laughed right along with her.
My whole face burned. I stared at the wood grain so I wouldn’t cry in front of them.
“The rest of you can open the envelopes now,” Mr. Haas said. “Mrs. Huffman asked that the boxes be opened in the same sitting.”
Paper tore all around the table.
My mom read hers, folded it in half, and started crying.
Demetrius got Grandpa’s fishing reel and just held it.
Uncle Garland didn’t touch his envelope.
He went straight for his box.
It was the smallest one there. Smaller than a deck of cards.
“It’s a key,” he told Aunt Sharon. “The house key. Has to be.”
He split the tape with his thumbnail.
Then he stopped moving.
The color went out of his face from the forehead down.
Aunt Sharon leaned over his shoulder. “What? What is it?”
He held it up.
A card of hearing aid batteries.
Orange tabs. The exact kind I bought every Sunday.
Every slot was EMPTY but one.
Tucked under it was a note, folded small, in Grandma’s slanted handwriting.
Uncle Garland opened it with two fingers, like it might bite.
He read the top line out loud before he could stop himself.
“THREE-FORTY, EASY, ONCE SHE’S IN THE GROUND.”
His voice cracked on the last word.
Aunt Sharon grabbed for the paper. He wouldn’t let go.
Under his words, Grandma had written the date, and the time, and what my aunt said back.
The line under his thumb
“Then let her go right there in that chair. Cheaper.”
Those were the words under his thumb. Grandma had put quotation marks around them and written SHARON beside them.
I stood up and reached across the table.
“Let me see.”
Garland folded the note before my fingers reached it.
My keys slid off my lap and hit the floor. Mom picked them up, closed her hand around them, and said, “Sit down, Bri.”
I sat because she was crying. That still worked on me.
Sharon pressed her nails against her husband’s sleeve.
“What else does it say?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s writing on the back,” I said.
He put the note beneath his unopened envelope.
Mr. Haas’s grin was gone. He rested both hands on his folder.
“Mrs. Huffman wanted that read here.”
“We’ve read it,” Garland said.
“Not all of it.”
Grandma’s sister sat at the other end of the room with her purse in her lap. My three other cousins had stopped opening their boxes. One still held a piece of tape between two fingers.
Nobody wanted to be the next person who made a sound.
I did.
“Read what she wrote.”
Garland turned toward me with the expression he used when a waitress brought him something he’d ordered but no longer wanted.
“You’ve done enough.”
My mother squeezed my keys. The little ring clicked against her wedding band.
“What does that mean?” I said.
Sharon pulled her chair closer to Garland’s.
“It means your grandmother didn’t pull those words out of the air.”
I wanted Mom to put her hand back over mine. She kept both hands in her lap.
Across the table, the battery card lay faceup in its box. I’d held that card in Grandma’s kitchen. I’d peeled those tabs off.
Now everybody was looking at me.
Garland pushed his envelope aside and kept the note under his palm.
“Tell them how she got my exact words, Bri.”
Grandma’s crooked seven
That same afternoon, with his hand covering the paper, I could still see Grandma’s date.
She crossed her sevens. Nobody else in our bunch did. She said an uncrossed seven looked unfinished, like somebody had gone outside without pants.
I wanted to laugh at that. My throat wouldn’t allow it.
“She wrote them down,” I said.
“From what you told her.”
“I didn’t tell her.”
Sharon turned to my mother.
“Leslie, you know Bri repeated everything.”
Mom rubbed the folded edge of her own letter.
The Sunday before Grandma died, she’d made me sit beside the recliner while she worked a clue. I kept offering to straighten things. She kept pointing at the seat.
“You came to visit me or inspect the place?”
“Both. Your housekeeping score is slipping.”
“Then fire me.”
She’d laughed until she had to take her glasses off. When I stood to leave, she put her crossword book facedown on the chair and said, “Go do something you don’t have to do.”
“I’ll come next Sunday.”
“I know you will, baby.”
Back in the office, I pulled my chair closer to Mom’s.
“She was sitting right behind him.”
“We know where she was sitting,” Sharon said.
Garland tapped the note.
“This is exactly what I’m talking about. Every time we tried to discuss something practical, you made it ugly.”
Practical. That was his word for standing over his mother’s chair and calculating how much easier she would be to manage dead.
He’d worn that word out before the knees went in his suit.
“You brought somebody through her bedroom,” I said.
“To understand the value.”
“She was home.”
“It was her house.”
“Yes.”
He stopped tapping.
Mr. Haas opened his folder. Inside were several papers clipped together, and a folded sheet with my name in Grandma’s handwriting. He left that one where it was.
Beside my name was a date from January, after the afternoon at the sink.
I reached for it, then stopped.
“Is that mine?”
“It is,” he said. “We can take this in the order you need.”
Garland pulled his envelope toward him.
“Let’s get through the actual business.”
He wanted the numbers. Sharon wanted the numbers. Even I wanted a number now, though mine was how many seconds Mom would keep looking down.
Her thumb moved over the crease in her letter again.
“Mom,” I said.
She turned it facedown.
“Please don’t make me choose in here.”
The envelope he wouldn’t open
Garland broke the seal on his envelope before I could answer her.
He read the page once, then held it farther away, as if Grandma might have left him more money in a larger font.
Sharon reached over.
He let her take this one.
“What’s it say?” Demetrius said.
“Private correspondence,” Garland said.
“You read the other one out loud.”
“Because I didn’t know what it was.”
Demetrius put Grandpa’s reel back in its box. He left the lid off.
I nearly thanked him. Then Garland stood and came around behind my chair.
“Bri. A word.”
“We’re all here.”
“A private word.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. I slid forward until it fell away.
Mom said my name.
I hated that she could still make it sound like I was the one holding up traffic.
Garland leaned against the wall beside us.
“I know you’re upset. We all are. Your grandmother was old, and toward the end she’d get an idea and stick with it.”
“She finished the Sunday crossword in pen.”
“That doesn’t mean she understood everything people put in front of her.”
Mr. Haas closed his folder halfway.
“She understood what she signed.”
“I wasn’t speaking to you.”
“You were speaking about my client.”
Garland straightened his jacket and returned to his chair.
Sharon had read his letter by then. Her mouth stayed open.
“Rosemary wrote this?”
“Yes,” Mr. Haas said.
“And you just let her?”
He didn’t answer that one. There wasn’t much room for an answer that wouldn’t make her sound worse.
She put the page down.
Garland turned it over.
I couldn’t see the words, but I could see what he wanted: his palm on the page, his wife beside him, the rest of us looking somewhere else.
“Whatever is in there,” I said, “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Sharon said.
She gave of course enough work to support a family.
Mom reached toward me, then stopped short of my arm.
“You spent more time with her than anybody.”
“On Sundays.”
“And you talked.”
“That’s generally what a visit is.”
“Don’t be smart.”
I wanted to say Grandma liked me smart. She liked me loud, too. She liked it when I argued about a crossword answer and lost. She never once told me to make myself easier for Garland.
But Mom’s eyes were wet, and my own eyes were getting there.
Garland took the opening.
“Nobody’s accusing you of a crime. We’re saying things get repeated. An old woman hears something from somebody she trusts, and she takes it the wrong way.”
“She heard you herself.”
“With hearing aids that didn’t work?”
“The batteries worked.”
“You don’t know that.”
I did know. I’d heard the little squeal when I held one cupped in my hand. I’d put it back, and she’d told me to quit fiddling and sit down.
But I couldn’t prove what she’d heard after it went into her ear. I couldn’t bring her into that room and let her answer him.
He sat back.
“There. That’s all I’m saying.”
Then he held his hand out to Mom.
“Give me the house key. We need to get over there.”
She looked at the ring in her lap.
My grandmother’s key was still on it.
My mother’s closed hand
Mom worked Grandma’s key around the ring that same afternoon, one small turn at a time.
“Don’t,” I said.
“We’ll give it back.”
“Then why take it off?”
“Because Garland’s going to the house.”
“So am I.”
He hadn’t invited me. That was clear from the way Sharon looked at him.
Mom stopped turning the key.
“Bri, we need to sort things. You can’t sit in her chair every Sunday now.”
There it was. The chair, the Sundays, the thing I’d been trying not to say since the funeral.
I hadn’t asked for Grandma’s money. I hadn’t asked for her house. I’d wanted to go inside once without somebody opening a cupboard and deciding what could fit in their car.
“You can sort things while I’m there.”
“You’re attached to everything.”
“I’m attached to her.”
Nobody answered.
Sharon gathered the wrapping from her box and pressed it into a ball.
“This is what I meant, Leslie. We won’t be able to touch a thing.”
“Nobody’s touching anything until we finish here,” Mr. Haas said.
Garland faced my mother.
“Tell her. Please. She won’t hear it from me.”
Mom wiped under one eye.
I waited for her to say he’d gone too far. I’d been waiting since Thanksgiving. I could have grown tomatoes in the time I’d given that woman.
Instead, she said, “Your uncle wasn’t wishing for her to die.”
I pulled my chair away from hers.
“I heard him.”
“I know what you heard.”
“So did Grandma.”
“Maybe she heard pieces. Maybe you filled in the rest.”
The room got hot. I took my coat off because I needed to do something that wasn’t screaming at my mother.
Demetrius leaned forward.
“Aunt Leslie.”
“Please,” she said. “I’m trying to stop this.”
Garland spread his hands.
“Thank you. That’s all somebody needed to say.”
He could have stopped there. He’d got my mother to stand beside him while she was sitting beside me. Most people would have quit while the theft was going well.
He kept going.
“Briana has always been protective. That’s admirable. But there comes a point where you have to ask what somebody gets out of being the only good person in the family.”
I looked at Mom.
She looked at my coat.
“What did I get?” I said.
Garland touched his letter.
“We’re about to find out.”
I couldn’t keep my face from crumpling then. I tried pressing my tongue against the back of my teeth, a trick that had never worked once and still got hired for every emergency.
Mom reached for my wrist.
I moved it.
“Tell him I didn’t do that.”
“Bri—”
“Tell him.”
She shut her eyes.
“I wasn’t there every Sunday.”
I stood so fast the chair struck the wall.
Grandma’s sister put her purse on the floor.
“Leslie, look at your daughter.”
Mom opened her eyes. But Garland was already talking.
“This is getting out of hand. Let’s take a break. Sharon and I have an appointment, and frankly, I don’t intend to sit here while a young woman has a tantrum about an inheritance she hasn’t even heard yet.”
I picked up my coat.
My cousins shifted to let me pass. Demetrius started to stand, and I put my hand on the back of his chair.
“Stay.”
I didn’t want a parade. I wanted my car and a door I could close.
At the end of the table, I held my hand out to Mom.
“My keys.”
She put the ring into my palm.
One key was missing.
Grandma’s key lay beside Garland’s envelope.
The empty chair by the door
I stopped beside the conference room door.
Nobody said my name for a few seconds. I think they expected me to leave and make the room comfortable again.
I’d been doing that since I was tall enough to carry a plate to the sink.
Garland picked up Grandma’s key.
“There. We’ll all cool off.”
“Put it down,” I said.
Mom stood.
“Bri, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Then put it down.”
He set it on his envelope but left a finger through the hole.
I turned to Mr. Haas.
“Can I get my letter another day?”
“Yes.”
“Do I need to sign anything before I go?”
“No.”
Garland pushed his chair back.
“Excellent. We can all—”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
He stopped halfway up.
My mother pressed her hands against the back of my chair. She’d been holding me upright in the elevator less than an hour earlier. Now there was an empty seat between us and she looked relieved to have furniture to hold.
I wanted to go back to before that morning. Not before Grandma died. I knew better than to ask for something that big.
Just before the elevator, when my mother still felt like somewhere I could stand.
Mr. Haas took the sheet with my name out of his folder.
“Your grandmother asked me to give you this separately.”
He held it out.
I didn’t move.
Sharon made a sound through her nose.
Garland looked at her and then at the page.
“Can you tell us whether she’s getting the house? We might as well stop pretending that’s not what this is about.”
I could have left. He would have told that story before the elevator reached the lobby.
Bri threw a fit. Bri worked on Grandma. Bri got the house.
Grandma would have spent her last months hearing him talk over her, and her first family gathering after death would end with him talking over her handwriting.
I put my coat on the empty chair.
“May I see the rest of his note first?”
Mr. Haas turned toward Garland.
Garland folded his arms.
“It’s addressed to me.”
“Your mother asked for it to be read in this room.”
“Then you should have read it yourself.”
“You opened the box.”
Sharon reached for her purse.
“We don’t have to stay for this.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t.”
She stopped with the strap in her hand.
I went back to the table and stood across from my uncle.
“Leave the note. Take your appointment.”
He stared at me.
“And let you do what you want with it?”
“Let me read what she wrote.”
Mom said, “Garland, just give it to her.”
He looked up at her. For a second, she almost sat down.
Then she held out her hand.
He pulled the note from beneath the envelope and pushed it across the table. It stopped short of me.
Mom picked it up.
She started to unfold it.
“No,” I said.
Her hands stopped.
“Give it to me.”
I took the paper from my mother. One corner was damp where Garland had held it.
At the fold, Grandma had drawn an arrow.
I followed it onto the back.
The back of Garland’s note
On the back, Grandma had written what happened after I went outside that January afternoon.
“Bri went to her car. Leslie went out with her coat. Garland, you said, ‘She’ll get over it when there’s a check.'”
I read that line twice.
Mom sat down.
She’d brought my coat to the car. She’d stood outside while I cried and told me not to let him spoil my visit.
She knew I couldn’t have heard him then.
Garland reached for the note.
I moved it away.
The next line was shorter.
“I was still in the room.”
Sharon lowered her purse onto her lap.
Grandma’s sister put her hand over her mouth.
Under that, the writing got smaller.
“My ears need help. There is nothing wrong with my arithmetic. I heard you before March, too.”
Garland said, “That’s enough.”
I kept reading.
“The money was settled before you started coming on Sundays. Mr. Haas has the dates. You weren’t earning the house. Bri wasn’t earning it either.”
Mr. Haas put one finger on the papers in his folder.
“The main arrangements predate her eighty-fourth birthday.”
All those Sundays with the tape measure. All that shouting into her face. He’d been bargaining with a woman who hadn’t put anything up for sale.
I laid his note down and opened mine.
Grandma had written only half a page.
“Bri, the blue chair is yours if you want that old thing. The crossword book is in its pocket. Your money is the same share as your cousins’. You don’t have to keep the house to keep me.”
I pressed the page against my coat.
There was more.
“Garland will have an opinion. He’s had plenty of practice. Don’t give him your Sundays.”
I couldn’t read the last line aloud.
Mom leaned toward me.
“What does it say?”
I handed the letter to Demetrius.
His eyes filled before he got to the bottom.
Then he said it for me.
“Buy the batteries if you want, baby. You don’t have to come and put them in anymore.”
Four o’clock
Garland stood while Demetrius was still holding my letter.
“This is disgraceful.”
Nobody moved to help him with his jacket.
“She was my mother. Whatever she wrote in a temper, I was her son for sixty-three years. You don’t get to erase that over one conversation.”
“January,” Demetrius said.
“What?”
“That was one conversation. There were other Sundays.”
“You weren’t there for all of them.”
“No. Bri was.”
Garland turned toward me.
“So that’s it? You sit there and let everybody think the worst?”
I put my letter inside my coat.
“Read yours.”
“I have.”
“Out loud.”
“That’s none of your business.”
I left it there. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life trying to drag words out of him that Grandma had put on paper for free.
Mr. Haas gave us the terms in plain language.
The house would be sold. Its proceeds would go into the remainder of the estate, to be divided equally among her five grandchildren. Mom and Grandma’s sister had money set aside for them. The personal gifts were named separately.
Garland’s gift was the box he’d opened.
Sharon’s letter said there was no money left to her.
Garland sat down.
“No.”
Mr. Haas waited.
“No. Go back. You’re saying nothing?”
“Neither money nor property was left to you.”
“And my sister?”
“Your sister’s gift belongs to your sister.”
Mom’s hand went to her envelope.
Garland pointed at her.
“You knew.”
She shook her head.
“You cried before anybody said a word. You knew.”
“I read my letter.”
“And you let me sit here.”
That was the part that offended him. He’d come dressed to collect, and she’d let him wear the suit.
Sharon stood.
“Rosemary asked us to come over. Every time. She could have told us to stay away.”
“You brought a tape measure,” I said.
“We were helping.”
“With the drapes?”
“Don’t twist things.”
Demetrius picked up Grandpa’s reel and put it in his coat pocket.
Garland faced him.
“You’re taking that?”
“Grandma gave it to me.”
“That was my father’s.”
“He was my grandfather.”
“You understand what they’re doing to me?”
Demetrius pushed his chair in.
“I understand what you said about her.”
Garland struck the table with his palm. My mother jumped.
“I paid my way my whole life. I didn’t need her money.”
“Then cancel four o’clock,” I said.
He looked at the clock.
For all the talk about not needing anything, he hadn’t forgotten his appointment.
“That’s a separate matter.”
“You’re showing somebody a house you can’t sell.”
“I can give an opinion about my mother’s house.”
“Over the phone.”
Sharon said, “Garland, let’s go.”
He put Grandma’s key in his pocket.
I held out my hand.
He looked at Mom.
She stood beside me.
“Give her the key.”
“I’ll need it to get my things.”
“You can arrange that,” Mr. Haas said.
Garland pulled it out and dropped it into my palm.
Mom closed my fingers over it, then let go. This time she left it with me.
He took out his phone.
“I’m doing this because you’re all being ridiculous.”
Nobody gave him a softer reason.
He called his friend while we waited.
“Don’t go over there at four.”
A pause.
“No, there’s no point.”
He turned toward the window.
“The house isn’t mine to list.”
He ended the call and put his phone away too hard. It slipped past his pocket and hit the floor.
Nobody bent down.
When he straightened, he faced my mother.
“After everything we’ve been through, you’re going to let this girl tell you who your brother is?”
Mom cried then, without trying to hide it.
“I heard you in January.”
Garland opened his mouth.
“And I told her to get over it.”
She reached for me, stopped, and put her hand over her own mouth.
Garland picked up his envelope. Sharon was waiting at the door.
He looked back at the battery card.
I slid the box toward him.
He left it where it was.
“You’ve got what you wanted,” he said to me.
I thought about Grandma in that chair, holding still while I changed the batteries.
“No,” I said. “She died.”
He went out.
The pocket in the recliner
We went to the house after the meeting, Mom and Demetrius and me.
I opened the door with my key.
Mom stood behind me until I stepped aside. She took her shoes off without anybody asking.
Grandma’s chair faced the window. The drapes were still up.
Demetrius went toward the chair, then stopped.
“You want me to wait?”
I nodded.
I put my hand into the pocket beside the arm. Her crossword book was there, bent to fit, with the pen tucked inside.
The last puzzle was unfinished.
I sat down and laid it on my knees.
There wasn’t another message hidden in it. No final clue for me to solve. She’d filled in most of the squares, changed one answer, and stopped.
I cried so hard I couldn’t keep the book open.
Mom knelt beside the chair.
“I’m sorry.”
I kept crying.
She stayed there.
After a while she said, “I wanted him to stop being angry. I put it on you because you were easier.”
“You let him say I used her.”
“I know.”
“I needed you in that room.”
“I know.”
I wiped my face on my sleeve. Grandma would have passed me a tissue and then complained about my sleeve. I wanted both so badly my chest hurt.
Mom put her hand on the arm of the chair.
“Can I take this home with you?”
“The whole chair?”
“Yes.”
“It’s enormous.”
“Your grandmother fit a lot of opinions in it.”
I laughed into my wet sleeve. Mom cried harder at that.
Demetrius came back from the hallway.
“I can help move it Saturday.”
That summer, the house sold for $340,000.00. Garland’s number, right down to the zeroes. None of it went to him.
When the estate was settled, my share came to $212,640.16. My cousins received the same. Garland received no cash, no house, and no gold watch. The watch went to Mom, exactly where Grandma had put it in writing.
I didn’t buy the house. I didn’t outbid anybody or turn it into a monument I couldn’t afford to leave.
But that afternoon, before we locked up, I helped Demetrius pull the recliner away from the wall.
Under it was one orange battery tab.
I put it in my pocket.
Sunday, eleven o’clock
On the first Sunday after the chair arrived at my apartment, Mom came over at eleven.
She stood outside holding a crossword book.
“You busy?”
“Extremely. I’ve been moving this chair three inches at a time since eight.”
It took up most of the space by my window. From one angle, my living room looked like a furniture store had coughed.
Mom came inside.
She didn’t tell me where to put it.
For a few minutes we tried it facing the other wall. Then we put it back where it had been. Demetrius had warned us not to move it without him. We had treated that as a suggestion, which was how Grandma raised both of us.
Mom sat on the sofa.
I sat in the blue chair.
She opened the crossword book and read me a clue.
“Five letters. A place you belong.”
“Check the crossings,” I said. “Those people cheat.”
Mom smiled, then looked down.
“Are we all right?”
I rubbed the place on the chair’s arm where Grandma’s hand had rested.
“We’re sitting here.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t ask me to make it bigger than that.
Later, my phone rang. Garland’s name came up.
I turned it facedown.
He could leave a message. He could use all the minutes he wanted. I had no appointment with him, and there wasn’t a single battery in the world that required me to listen.
Mom held out the crossword book.
“Your grandmother would’ve had this done.”
“Then don’t tell her we’re struggling.”
I reached for the lever. The footrest came up under my legs with the same clunk it had made in Grandma’s house.
Mom moved closer with her pen.
“All right, Bri. What’s fourteen down?”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who knows what showing up every Sunday means.
Family loyalty gets tested in all sorts of painful ways, from a father demanding an apology over an empty vest to an aunt arriving with a $340,000 waiver at Grandma’s hospital door. For another twist on betrayal at home, see the husband who put his wife’s suitcase back in the attic.
