They always matter more than people think. But first, let me tell you about the life before that morning. My name is Margaret Ellis. I am 74 years old and I have lived in the same yellow house on Carver Street in Columbus, Ohio for most of my adult life. My husband Roland built the back porch with his own hands in 1987.
He died of a heart attack in 2009. And after that, the house became quieter in a way that houses do when a large laughing man is no longer inside them. I kept the porch. I kept the hydrangeas. I kept going. My son Derek moved in 2 years after Roland passed. He was 41 at the time, recently divorced from his first wife, between jobs, as he liked to say, a phrase that can mean many things, and usually means one specific thing.
He arrived with two duffel bags in a story about needing just a few months to get back on his feet. I believed him because he was my son and because I had always believed him, which was perhaps the central habit of my life that I should have examined more closely. That was 10 years ago.
In those 10 years, Derek never fully got back on his feet, at least not in any direction that carried him toward the front door. He found work eventually, driving for a freight company, decent pay, irregular hours, and 3 years after moving in, he brought home a woman named Cynthia, who had sharp fingernails, a faster smile than her eyes could keep up with, and an immediate and total opinion about how I arranged my kitchen.
They married in a small ceremony I helped pay for. They continued to live in my house in Roland’s old study, which they repainted without asking me, a color called harvest fog that looked to me like the inside of a mistake. I am not a bitter woman. I want to be clear about that. I made room for Cynthia because she was Dererick’s wife.
And I made room for Derek because he was my son and because the house was large enough and because I was at my core someone who believed that family was worth the inconvenience. But there were things I noticed. The way you notice a small crack in a wall and tell yourself it has always been there. I noticed that Cynthia had taken to referring to the living room as our living room with an emphasis on the hour that subtly excluded me.
