We hadn’t been back at the house for 10 minutes when my DIL found me in the front room, a sheaf of stapled papers in her hand.
“Get out,” she said, shaking the pages at me. “The house has been in our family trust since before you ever walked through that door. Daddy signed it. Your name isn’t on a single line. You’ve embarrassed our mother’s memory long enough!”
“Get out.”
Daniel walked in carrying my old brown suitcase, the one I’d brought with me the winter before. He set it at my feet without a word.
“Please,” I whispered. “At least let me take his photograph. Just one.”
“No,” Margaret said. “Nothing in this house belongs to you. The trust is very clear.”
I looked at my son-in-law (SIL). He looked at the floor.
“The trust is very clear.”
So I picked up the suitcase, still wearing the same black dress I’d worn to bury my husband, and I walked out the front door of the second home where I’d known love. I had nowhere to go but a trailer by the county road.
***
Ruth’s old trailer sat at the end of a gravel road. I dragged my suitcase up the warped steps and stood in the kitchen for a long while, just listening to the faucet drip. My sister had been gone for four years, but her dish towels still hung on the oven handle.
I had nowhere to go.
Ruth had left the trailer to me when she passed, and I’d been paying the lot rent ever since out of habit, never imagining I’d need it.
***
The first nights were the hardest. I slept in the housecoat that my high school sweetheart had bought me because it still smelled faintly of his aftershave. I cried in a way I hadn’t cried since Howard’s death.
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