The second stone was Grady’s.
In early March of 2024, about a week after we buried his father, my son sat down at my kitchen table and asked for forty thousand dollars out of Leif’s life insurance.
The flowers from the funeral were still on the counter. Some of them were starting to brown at the edges.
Darcy had opened a clothing boutique downtown. Little dresses, candles, earrings shaped like lemons. And it was sinking.
“Darcy’s cards are at twenty grand, Mom,” he said. “Forty would save the store.”
I said no.
I said it gently, but I said it. The store had lost money every single month for two years. I’d seen the numbers, because Grady showed them to me himself the Christmas before. And I had just become a widow, living on Social Security and my retirement savings.
He stood up so fast the chair scraped across my floor.
“Dad would have said yes.”
That’s what he said. Seven days after we put his father in the ground.
The boutique closed in January of 2025.
The third stone was Darcy’s.
Sunday, March 9th, 2025. Pot roast at my table.
Darcy was cutting her meat into very small pieces. She didn’t look up when she said it.
“Mom could stay with you a while, you know. You have four bedrooms.”
“Visits, always,” I said. “Living here, no.”
She set down her knife and fork.
After that, Darcy started calling my cruise “eleven grand on a boat.”
It cost six thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars.
I didn’t correct her.
So that’s what I figured out, sitting on the deck of that ship with a blanket around my knees.
They hadn’t forgotten a single no.
They had just been waiting for me to leave the house.
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