On the third morning, I took my phone and called the mansion. Margaret answered.
“It’s Eleanor,” I said. “Please. I just want the picture from the mantel, the one of him fishing. I’ll pay for the shipping.”
The first nights were the hardest.
“Don’t call here again,” my DIL said.
The line went dead before I could draw a breath.
***
Two days after that, a courier knocked on the trailer door, holding a thin envelope from Daniel’s stationery. When I opened the letter, it said I wasn’t to contact the family or contest anything.
It was said that their father had been confused in his final months and that they wouldn’t tolerate interference.
“Don’t call here again.”
I read it twice, folded it, and put it in the drawer. I didn’t bother writing back. I didn’t have the fight in me, and I wasn’t even sure I had the right.
***
My neighbor, Joyce, came over that Sunday with a tuna casserole.
“Heard you were new,” she said, setting it on the counter as if we’d known each other for years. “I don’t ask questions unless they’re invited.”
“I appreciate that,” I told her.
“My Walter passed in ’09. The first month, I forgot how to eat. So I’m not asking if you’re hungry. I’m just leaving this here.”
I almost cried into the casserole. I didn’t, but it was close.
I didn’t bother writing back.
***
I started going to the little country church up the road on Wednesdays. Nobody there knew who Garrett had been. They just knew I sang alto and brought a pound cake when it was my turn.
Slowly, I stopped waiting for the phone to ring. I stopped rehearsing what I’d say to Margaret if she ever apologized. I started believing the silence was the rest of my story, and I told myself I could make peace with it.
I stopped waiting for the phone to ring.
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