“IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME, DON’T TRUST GARRISON.”
My name is Margaret.
I’m forty-eight years old.
Six years ago, I was a wife and the mother of six children.
Three boys.
Three girls.
Our house was never quiet.
There were shoes scattered across the hallway.
Schoolbags hanging from chairs.
Dirty dishes in the sink.
And arguments about who had eaten the last piece of cake.
My husband, Roscoe, used to say that our home sounded like a train station.
I always laughed.
“Then stop bringing home children,” I’d tease.
He would grin.
“Too late now.”
We weren’t wealthy.
Roscoe worked as a maintenance supervisor for a regional construction company.
I worked part-time at a community library.
We lived in a modest house surrounded by maple trees.
There was a vegetable garden behind the kitchen.
A basketball hoop beside the driveway.
And a wooden swing Roscoe had built when our oldest daughter was small.
