Chapter 5: The People We Forgot We Were
Three days passed without a call from either of them.
Richard and I went on our trip.
We hadn't cancelled it.
We hadn't even discussed cancelling it.
The morning after Melissa and Kevin left, Richard simply went online, confirmed the reservation, and set our bags by the door.
The hotel was exactly what the pictures had promised.
Small.
Clean.
A little worn at the edges in the way that comfortable places often are.
Our room looked out over a courtyard with a fountain that made a sound like rain.
We ate breakfast at a table outside.
We read.
We slept past seven for the first time in months.
On the second afternoon, we drove to see Patricia Ellison.
She lived in a small house on a street full of maple trees.
The kind of street that looks like it belongs to a different era.
She answered the door before we'd finished knocking, which told me she'd been watching for us.
"I wasn't sure you'd actually come," she said.
"We said we would," Richard told her.
She stepped back to let us in.
The house smelled like tea and old books and something baking.
Photographs covered the wall beside the door — decades of them, overlapping at the edges.
My mother-in-law was in several of them.
Young, laughing, standing beside Patricia with their arms linked.
We sat in her front room for three hours.
She talked about Richard's mother in ways we'd never heard.
Stories from before Richard was born.
Stories from the years when they were both young women figuring out how to be adults in a world that didn't make it easy.
She laughed at things we hadn't known were funny.
She cried once, briefly, and then straightened up and poured more tea like it hadn't happened.
"She talked about you two constantly," Patricia said.
"Right up until the end.
She worried about you, you know.
Not about whether you'd be all right financially.
About whether you'd remember to enjoy it.
She said Richard worked too hard and you worried too much."
I felt Richard go still beside me.
"She was right about both," he said.
Patricia looked at him steadily.
"She was right about most things."
When we stood to leave, Patricia walked us to the door.
She held my hand for a moment before letting go.
"Whatever you did," she said, "with the estate — I want you to know I didn't ask for it.
I wouldn't have asked."
"We know," I said.
"That's why."
She nodded once.
She didn't cry again.
But she held the door open and watched us walk to the car, and she was still standing there when Richard pulled out of the street.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes.
Then Richard said, "We should have come sooner."
"Yes," I said.
"We got busy."
"We did."
He was quiet for another moment.
"I don't want to get busy like that again."
I looked out the window at the maple trees moving in the wind.
"Then let's not."
My phone buzzed in my bag.
I didn't check it until we were back at the hotel.
It was a text from Kevin.
Four words.
*Can we start over?*
I stared at it for a long time.
Richard read it over my shoulder.
"Don't answer tonight," he said quietly.
"Why not?"
"Because you deserve to think about it first.
Not react.
Think."
I set the phone on the nightstand.
We had dinner.
We watched the fountain from our window until it got dark.
I thought about Kevin at twelve years old, bringing me wildflowers from the yard because I'd had a hard week.
I thought about Melissa at sixteen, sitting with me through a long night when my own mother was sick, not saying much, just being there.
I thought about who they had been before they became people who talked about our deaths like a financial transaction.
And I thought about whether those two things could exist in the same person — and whether one of them could come back.
May you like
I didn't answer Kevin's text that night.
But I didn't delete it either.
