My kids sat me down at a Sunday dinner in Cleveland and explained, patiently, like I was already senile, that selling the house now would save everyone a fortune in inheritance taxes later. "You'll live with us, Mom," my son Derek said. His wife, Amber, didn't look up from cutting her daughter's chicken. My daughter, Jess, just stared at her wine glass.
I was seventy-four. The house in West Park was the only thing I had left from Rich. My husband died four years ago on a Tuesday, right there in his recliner, the remote still in his hand. The house had a cracked front step and a furnace that made noise like it was clearing its throat, but it was mine.
Now I live in one room above a dry cleaner in Lakewood. The smell of solvent comes up through the floor vents at 6 a.m. My window faces a brick wall, and I've counted the bricks three times: 412. There's a coffee maker on a crate, and a hot plate, and a toaster oven with a dial I've never figured out. I pay $700 a month from my check. The dry cleaner's wife bangs a broom against the ceiling when I walk too heavy.
I signed the papers at a title office on Lorain Road. Waited two hours in a hard chair with my coat on because the heat was broken. Derek kept saying, "This is just cleanup, Ma. Just paperwork." The notary stamped the sale, and I held a pen that had a rubber grip with teeth marks on it. I remember thinking: someone bit this pen. Someone sat in this same chair, nervous as hell, and bit the pen and signed.
The sale came out to $186,000. Split down the middle, after the realtor and the title fees and a list of deductions Derek said were "standard." Each of them took $93,000.
Jess took her half and disappeared. "Debts," she texted. "You know how it is, Ma." Then a running lady emoji. I didn't know how it was. I'd never seen her debts. But she'd been going through something for years, and I'd taught myself not to ask, because every time I asked she stopped answering for a week.
The first six weeks at Derek's were fine. They gave me Lucas's room, with the racecar wall decals and a mattress that sagged on one side. Amber made coffee in the morning and left a cup outside my door. I took the kids to the bus stop, and Lucas held my hand crossing the street, and for a few minutes a day I felt like I still had a place.
Then it crept.
"Ma, can you pick up from soccer? Amber's got spin class."
"Ma, if you're already at the grocery, can you grab stuff for the week? I'll pay you back." He never paid me back.
"Ma, just leave the laundry folded on the stairs."
By the third month I was up at 5:30 making pancakes, loading the dishwasher, stripping beds, mending the hem on Amber's work pants because I still had my sewing kit, the one Rich bought me for our twentieth anniversary. The one with the brass clasp. I used it more in that house than I had in years.
Amber came home from work and lay on the couch with her phone, some show playing through her earbuds. "Thanks, Ma," she'd say to the ceiling. Derek would come home, kiss the top of my head like I was a dog, and disappear into the garage to work on his Mustang.
One night I sat on the edge of the racecar bed and did the math. I was working thirteen hours a day in that house. At minimum wage, with overtime, that came to about $680 a week. Times sixteen weeks. Nearly eleven thousand dollars in unpaid labor. I said it out loud to the room, to the decals of Lightning McQueen: "Eleven thousand dollars." The number didn't make me angry. It made me tired, the kind of tired that sits in your wrists.
I called Jess. It rang four times, then voicemail. I called again. She texted: "Can't talk, at work. Call you later." She didn't call later. She called three weeks later, from a concert, so I could hear the bass and a thousand people having a better time than me.
"Ma! I can't hear you! I'll call you back! Love you!" She didn't call back.
I tried Derek once. A Tuesday afternoon, Amber out with the kids. He sat across from me at the kitchen island, which was the kind of granite we couldn't have afforded when I was his age. He had stain from the garage on his forearm.
"Honey," I said, "I'm not trying to be difficult. But it feels like I'm working harder now than I did before."
He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "What do you want me to say, Ma? You sold the house. The money's gone. You can't just undo it."
"I don't want to undo it. I want to know what the plan is."
"The plan is you live here. What more do you want?"
"I want a room that's mine. I want someone to ask me what I need."
He stared at the faucet. His jaw did that thing Rich's jaw used to do when he didn't want to fight but didn't know how to stop one.
"Lucas wants his room back. Amber says the kids need to share less. So maybe… maybe you could look for something small. A studio. Jess could kick in."
Jess didn't kick in. Her money was gone — a car, a new laptop, a security deposit on a place with a pool. She said all this in a voicemail, her voice small and quick, like she was confessing to a stranger on a bus. "I know it looks bad, Ma. It is bad. I'm sorry." That was the only time in my life she'd apologized for anything.
That night I lay in Lucas's bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Rich put stars like that on our bedroom ceiling when we first moved into the West Park house, because I said I missed the sky at night. He stood on a chair with a roll of stickers and said, "The Big Dipper, just for you." He was off by six inches. I never told him. I'd look up every night and find the constellation slightly wrong, and it made me love him more.
The next morning I called Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority. The woman on the phone said, "The list is backed up, ma'am. Eighteen to twenty-four months, sometimes longer." Her voice had that flat, practiced pity that social workers use when they've said the same sentence too many times.
I hung up and packed my bag.
I didn't take much. The sewing kit. Rich's wedding ring, which I'd given to Derek for safekeeping and then taken back out of his nightstand when he was at work. Three blouses, two pairs of pants, a photo of the kids from before they got so complicated — Jess with a gap in her teeth, Derek in a cap holding a trophy. I left the racecar bed and the glow-in-the-dark stars. I left the coffee cup outside my door. I left, in the kitchen, my broth pot.
I didn't ask for it.
The room above the dry cleaner is the size of our old bathroom. The walls are the color of weak tea. The woman who owns the dry cleaner brings me discarded hangers from the store, so I have something to put sweaters on. She brought me a plastic tree last Christmas, three feet tall, already decorated, and we put it on the crate by the window with the brick wall view. Her name is Mrs. Vann. She's Korean, and every Sunday she walks up the back stairs with a container of food, knocks twice, and leaves before I can answer. She's been doing this for eighteen months. I've never once thanked her to her face, because by the time I open the door there's only the smell of garlic and the sound of her footsteps.
Derek calls on Sundays now. I've timed him: four minutes, maybe five. Last time he said, "Hey Ma, just checking in. Everything good?" I said, "I live above a dry cleaner, Derek." He said, "Right, right, but otherwise good?" I said, "I counted the bricks in the wall across the alley. Four hundred and twelve." There was a pause. Then he said, "That's something, Ma. Okay, well, love you. Gotta run."
Jess sends me heart emojis and Bitmojis and once, on my birthday, a video of herself singing "Happy Birthday" from a bar, with other people I don't know crowding into the frame, all of them waving at me like I was some distant relative in a nursing home PSA.
I don't hate them.
That's the part that still gets me at night, when the solvent fumes haven't yet faded and Mrs. Vann is talking to her birds on the other side of the wall. I don't hate them. I raised them the only way I knew. I sewed their Halloween costumes and drove them to practice and stayed up with fevers and never once let them know that some months Rich's check didn't cover the mortgage.
I think about the pot. It was a twelve-quart aluminum stockpot, with a lid that rattled if the broth boiled too hard. I made Sunday sauce in that pot for thirty-one years. Rich used to stand in the kitchen doorway and say, "Smells like Sunday school in here," and I'd flick a dish towel at him. The pot had a brown scorch mark on the side from a power outage in '98, when I was stirring by candlelight and the burner flared.
It's at Derek's house now, in some cabinet, maybe with the handle sticking out because it never fit right. Maybe Amber uses it to boil hot dogs for the kids. Maybe it's in the garage, under a tarp.
A month ago, I called Derek and asked for it back. That's it — just the pot, and the sewing kit, which I already had. He said, "The stew pot? I don't know, Ma. I'll look." He never looked. Or he looked and didn't find it. Or he found it and didn't tell me, because on some level even he knew what it meant.
So last Thursday, I went to the Goodwill on Detroit Avenue with a $20 bill from my pension. Mrs. Vann drove me, because it snowed and the sidewalks were a mess of salt and gray slush. I walked the aisles with a cart, past racks of other people's dishes and other people's bathrobes. I found a stockpot on a bottom shelf, dented on one side, no lid. It was $7.99. I held it up to the fluorescent light and there was a scorch mark on the side.
Not mine. Just some other woman's Sunday sauce, some other woman's husband in the doorway.
I bought it instead.
That evening I made broth in my room. It smelled like celery and onion and closed doors. I let it boil until the windows fogged over, and I traced a star in the steam with my finger, slightly off, like Rich would have done. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and ate it straight from the pot, alone, one spoonful at a time, while the dry cleaner hummed through the wall.
I didn't ask anyone if it was all right.
I just ate.
