Chapter 9: Galveston
We drove down on a Saturday.
Mom sat in the passenger seat with her window cracked two inches, which was exactly how she had always ridden in cars for as long as I could remember.
She said she liked the sound of the road.
My father used to tease her about it every time.
She didn't say much for the first hour.
Neither did I.
Somewhere past Houston she said, "Your father proposed to me in that kitchen, you know.
Standing next to the stove.
He had the ring in his shirt pocket and he was so nervous he dropped it and it rolled under the refrigerator and we had to move the refrigerator to get it back."
"I didn't know that."
"He was embarrassed about it for years.
I thought it was the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen."
I kept my eyes on the road.
"I'm going to fix the place up," I said.
"Whatever it needs.
New roof if the inspector says so.
I'll come down on weekends."
"You don't have to do that."
"I want to."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I'd like to spend more time there.
In the summers, maybe.
If that's all right."
"It's your house, Mom.
It'll always be your house."
She turned to look out the window.
The attorney had moved quickly.
The property transfer document had never been signed, which meant there was nothing to undo on that front.
The recordings were another matter.
My attorney — the one I had emailed that night — had listened to them carefully and used words like elder financial @buse and coercion and said that the canceled cognitive appointment alone was significant.
He said Melissa and Marcus both had exposure.
He said I should let him handle the next steps and not contact either of them directly.
I was trying to follow that advice.
Marcus had called twice.
I had let both calls go to voicemail.
His messages were short and careful and said nothing I hadn't already heard in the kitchen.
I wasn't ready to talk to him yet.
I didn't know when I would be.
That was a door I was leaving closed for now, not locked — just closed.
Melissa's attorney had sent a letter.
Mine had responded.
It was going to be a long process and I had accepted that.
We pulled onto the street just after noon.
The house looked the same as it always had — white clapboard, green shutters, the big live oak in the front yard that dropped acorns every fall and that my father had threatened to cut down every year and never did.
The garden was overgrown.
The porch railing needed paint.
Mom had her hand on the door handle before I fully stopped.
She walked up the front path slowly, one hand trailing along the fence.
She stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at the front door.
I came and stood beside her.
"You okay?" I asked.
She didn't answer right away.
She was looking at the door the way you look at something you thought you might never see again.
"He built those steps himself too," she said.
"Took him a whole weekend.
I brought him lemonade and he kept saying he didn't need it and drinking it anyway."
She climbed the steps.
I unlocked the door and pushed it open and she walked in ahead of me.
The house smelled like old wood and closed rooms and something faintly floral that I couldn't place.
Mom stood in the front hallway for a moment.
Then she walked straight to the kitchen.
She stood in the middle of it.
She put her hand on the counter — just rested it there, flat, the way you touch something to confirm it's real.
"There it is," she said softly.
She wasn't talking to me.
I went back to the front porch and sat on the steps and let her have the kitchen to herself.
The live oak moved in the Gulf breeze.
Down the street a dog was barking at something patient and distant.
The neighborhood was quiet in the way that old neighborhoods are quiet — not empty, just settled.
I sat there for a long time.
After a while the screen door opened behind me and Mom came out and sat down beside me on the top step, close enough that our shoulders touched.
She had the pearl earrings in.
Both of them.
She hadn't said anything when I gave them back to her.
She had just held them in her palm for a moment, then closed her fingers around them.
Now they caught the light, small and cream-colored and very old.
We sat together on the steps her husband had built, in front of the house he had poured his hands into, and we listened to the oak tree move, and neither of us needed to say anything at all.
The earrings were back where they belonged.
So was she.
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