“Mason. Did you send these?”
He looked at the screen for a long time.
“I don’t say ‘love you’ in texts,” he said. “You know that.”
I did know that. He thought it was embarrassing. Somebody in Florida didn’t.
Then the rest came out, quieter. Dolores had moved into our guest cottage two months before the wedding, and since then there had been rules. Mason couldn’t use the towels in the main bathroom. He had his own, a gray one, on a hook in the laundry room. His clothes were washed separately, late, when no one else needed the machine. His cousins called him “the guest.” When he’d told Colleen, she’d said, “Grandma’s old-fashioned. Just let it go, okay? For me.”
“I didn’t want to make it a thing,” he said. “You were already sad.”
My first wife, Laura, had died two Octobers before that night, after nineteen months of fighting an illness that didn’t care how hard she fought. Near the end, in the hospice room with the window that looked over the parking lot, she made me promise one thing.
