George and I were married for forty-one years. He was a quiet man who said more with a cup of tea on a porch than most people say in a paragraph.
We bought our house in Tucson the year we married, and we spent four decades making it ours. I painted the kitchen yellow because George said it made me look like sunshine. I planted rosebushes along the walk, and over thirty-eight years I learned their moods better than I knew most people’s.
When George passed, the grief was a physical thing, a weight on my chest that didn’t lift. And in that fog, when Todd said, Come live with us, Mom, it sounded like love. It sounded like being caught before I fell.
So I sold the house. I gave up the yellow kitchen and the roses and the porch, and I told myself I was being sensible, that a widow my age shouldn’t rattle around alone in all those memories.
