After twenty-eight hours on the ward, I came home to a second refrigerator humming beside mine. Marisol, my daughter-in-law, looked at my hospital badge and told me it was hers. From now on, she said, I should buy my own food.
Everything I had purchased that morning—four hundred and fifteen dollars of groceries—had a strip of yellow tape bearing her name. My son Wesley stood behind her, rubbing his eyes and telling me not to make it a big thing. Everyone needed boundaries, he said.
By Friday, her name was on my shampoo and even on the white casserole dish my husband had given me before he died. Then Wesley ate cereal I had paid for and suggested that if the house made me uncomfortable, I could find somewhere else.
So I stopped arguing.
I watched instead.
The locked refrigerator. The midnight grocery bags. The mailbox key missing from its hook.
Then I found the envelope.
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