“Then what do
you call this?”
“A transfer of ownership.”
Kristen laughed bitterly. “You’re enjoying this.”
I looked down at my knuckles, scarred and thick from decades of work. Hands like mine had signed payroll checks, lifted lumber, steadied grieving shoulders, held my husband’s fingers while cancer took him piece by piece. Hands like mine had built Trevor’s world. But they had never struck my son.
“No,” I said. “I’m not enjoying it. I’m finishing it.”
Trevor cursed under his breath. “Who bought it?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“It is when strangers are
standing in my foyer telling my wife we have thirty days.”
“Then you should speak with them politely.”
Kristen’s voice cracked with rage. “Thirty days? Gloria, do you understand what this will do to us socially?”
That was the sentence. Not emotionally. Not financially. Not to the family. Socially.
I closed my eyes for a moment. There it was, clean and ugly, the truth stripped of manners.
