Chapter 1 - The favor my son had already decided I would accept
At seventy, I had become suspicious of sentences beginning with, “Mom, we need a favor.”
Not because I disliked helping people. I had spent most of my life helping people. Thirty-eight years teaching piano to children whose parents believed talent could be purchased by the hour had given me a high tolerance for inconvenience. I had cared for my husband James through the last two years of his illness. I had taken in neighbors after surgeries, watched grandchildren who were not technically mine, and once driven forty miles through snow because my son David had locked himself out of an apartment at twenty-six.
What I disliked was the grammar of adulthood when children spoke to aging parents.
“We need a favor” often meant:
We have made a decision involving your time, your house, and your energy. We are now calling to give you the opportunity to agree gracefully.
That Thursday morning began with Schubert.
Pale November sunlight lay across the piano. My coffee was black, the way James used to call “medicinal,” and the house was quiet enough that I could hear the old radiator ticking between phrases.
Then my phone rang.
David.
I let it ring four times.
“Mom! Finally.”
“It’s eight-thirty.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you speaking as though I’ve been missing for days?”
He laughed, but there was strain beneath it.
“We need a favor.”
Of course.
His wife Clara’s stepfather, Thomas Caldwell, supposedly needed somewhere to stay for Thanksgiving weekend. His retirement community, Willow Pines, was undergoing emergency fumigation. Hotels were full. Their cruise left the next morning. Canceling would cost thousands.
Four days.
That was what he promised.
“He’s easy,” David said.
“No human being described as easy has ever been easy.”
“He reads. He likes classical music.”
“So did Stalin, probably.”
“Mom.”
I smiled despite myself.
Then David lowered his voice.
“Clara’s really upset. She feels like she’s abandoning him.”
That did it.
Not because I believed everything he said.
Because guilt remains effective long after one learns to recognize it.
I looked around my living room.
The piano.
James’s old chair.
The narrow staircase whose fourth step creaked no matter how carefully one climbed.
My house had become an extension of my nervous system after widowhood. I knew every sound. Every draft. Every object’s proper place.
Opening it to a stranger was not impossible.
It was simply intimate.
“Four days,” I said.
“Four.”
“And he leaves Monday.”
“Yes.”
“No reorganizing my kitchen.”
“I’ll warn him.”
“No television news before breakfast.”
“I don’t think he watches much television.”
“And if he snores loudly enough to frighten the pipes, he goes to a hotel whether one exists or not.”
David laughed.
“You’re the best.”
That phrase irritated me more than thanks should.
Because the best mother, in David’s vocabulary, was often the one who made his life easiest.
Thomas arrived at five forty-seven that evening.
He stepped from David’s car slowly, carrying a dark leather suitcase with no wheels. Tall. Silver-haired. Navy cardigan. Brown trousers pressed so sharply that I immediately distrusted him.
Clara hovered beside him with a tote bag.
David carried nothing.
Naturally.
“Mom, this is Thomas.”
Thomas gave me a slight bow.
“Mrs. Harris. I appreciate your generosity. I understand this is an imposition.”
“At least one of us does.”
Clara looked horrified.
Thomas almost smiled.
Interesting.
They stayed thirty-seven minutes.
Clara showed Thomas the guest room, explained his medication schedule even though he seemed perfectly capable of explaining it himself, and placed three containers of prepared food in my refrigerator as if I had never fed a man before.
David ate my crackers.
“You’re eating my crackers,” I told him.
“Stress.”
“From the cruise?”
“From everything.”
When they finally left, the front door closed behind them with a softness that made the silence afterward feel unusually large.
Thomas stood in my hallway with his suitcase.
I stood ten feet away.
Two widowed strangers.
Two people accustomed to choosing our own evenings.
“Well,” he said.
“Well.”
Then he looked toward the guest room.
“For what it’s worth, I offered to remain at Willow Pines.”
I frowned.
“I thought you couldn’t.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Couldn’t what?”
“Stay there. Because of the fumigation.”
The room changed.
Thomas rested both hands on the head of his cane.
“There is no fumigation.”
I stared at him.
He stared back.
Then he said quietly:
“Clara told me you had personally invited me because you were lonely.”
May you like
For the first time that day, I forgot entirely about my coffee.
Cliffhanger: Before David and Clara’s cruise had even left port, Eleanor and Thomas discovered they had been told completely different stories about why he was staying in her house.
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