I made breakfast the next morning. It felt like a small act of reclamation — my mother's kitchen, my mother's stove, pancakes from the recipe card in her handwriting that I found in the drawer. Margaret came in, saw me at the stove, and stopped in the doorway with an expression I could not read.
"You don't have to do that," she said.
"I want to."
Mark came in, already dressed for the dealership, and stopped short at the sight of the pancakes. "Well, well. Room service."
"Sit down, Mark," I said. "Eat."
We ate carefully, the four of us — Tina had already left for work, Josh was still asleep — like people handling something fragile. I waited until Mark had finished his second pancake.
"Mom," I said, keeping my voice gentle, "tell me about the papers you signed. The ones about the house."
The silence was immediate and total. Mark set down his fork with a click.
"She already told you," he said. "She signed it over. It's done."
"I'm asking Mom."
Margaret looked at her plate. "It was after the surgery. The hip. I was — they had me on the strong medicine, you know, the kind that makes everything swimmy. Mark brought papers. He said they were insurance paperwork. For the house." She glanced at Mark, quickly, fearfully. "I signed where he showed me. I don't — I don't really remember it, honey. But Mark says it's all proper."
"Because it is proper," Mark said. His voice had an edge now. "She was fine. The notary was there. It was all legal."
"A notary came to the house?"
"She couldn't get to the office, with the hip. I arranged it. I'm a good son, Diane. Somebody had to handle things while you were building your career on the other side of the planet."
I looked at my mother. "Mom, did you want to give Mark the house?"
She did not answer. She stood, took her plate to the sink, and began washing it with the careful, deliberate movements of a woman performing a task so she does not have to perform an emotion.
"Mom."
"I don't remember, Diane." Her voice was very quiet. "That's the truth. I don't remember."
Mark pushed back his chair. "This interrogation is over. Mom, you don't have to answer these questions." He looked at me. "You want to play lawyer? Get a lawyer. Until then, this is my house, and in my house we don't upset our mother."
He left for work. The front door closed harder than necessary. Through the window I watched him get into the pickup, sit there a moment with his hands on the wheel, and then drive off a little too fast, the way he had driven as a teenager when he was angry and trying not to show it.
I dried the plate my mother had washed. I put it in the cabinet. And I said, as gently as I knew how, "Mom, I'm going to look into this. Not to fight. Just to understand. Is that all right?"
She leaned against the sink. She looked, suddenly, every one of her seventy-one years. And then she said something that stayed with me for the rest of the day, in a voice so small I had to lean in to hear it.
"I used to be the one who knew things, Diane. When you were little, I knew where everything was. I knew what every paper meant." She looked down at her hands. "I don't want to be a woman who signs things she doesn't understand. But I think — I think I already am."
"Just be careful, honey," she said. "Please. Just be careful."
Chapter 7: Eleanor Next Door
Eleanor Vance had lived next door for twenty years, and she had the kind of face that had never learned to hide what it thought. She opened her door, took one look at me, and pulled me into a hug that smelled like lavender and dish soap.
"Diane Keller. Look at you. You got thin. Singapore not feeding you?"
"They feed me fine, Eleanor. I just —" I stopped. "Can I come in? I need to ask you something."
Her kitchen was the opposite of my mother's: bright, cluttered, alive. She put the kettle on without asking, the way women of her generation do, and sat me down at a table covered with seed catalogs.
"It's about the house," I said. "And the papers Mom signed."
Eleanor's expression changed. The warmth did not leave her face, but something harder settled in behind it.
"I wondered when you'd ask," she said. "I've been waiting eighteen months for somebody to ask."
"Tell me."
"It was six weeks after the hip surgery. Your mother was still groggy half the day — those pain pills, they had her floating. Mark came home in the middle of a weekday with a man in a suit. They went into the living room with your mother. I was weeding my roses by the fence, and I could see through the window. Your mother could barely sit up. Mark kept pointing at the papers, pointing where to sign, like —" Eleanor made a stabbing gesture with her finger. "Like she was a child doing homework."