Gregory appeared at the screen door.
“You okay?”
“I think so.”
“Want me to come out?”
“Not yet.”
He nodded and disappeared.
I returned to the letter.
Do not keep the house because the children expect you to.
Do not sell it because you are angry with them.
Keep it only if it gives you a life you still want.
There it was.
The exact question Ellen and Gertrude had been trying to ask me.
But Robert had asked it almost two years earlier.
I turned the page.
There is something else.
The last few years, I’ve worried that we trained the children to mistake love for availability.
That sentence stopped me.
I read it again.
We did too much for them, Margaret.
You more than me.
We were proud of being dependable, but sometimes dependability becomes an arrangement nobody remembers agreeing to.
If I go first, I suspect they will lean on you harder.
