So I kept my face blank.
Vanessa blinked. She had expected a fight. She wanted me to scream, to beg, to give her something she could use later to paint me as unstable. Robert stood behind her with his hands shoved into his pockets, staring at the floor like a child waiting for permission to leave the principal’s office.
My son. Forty-two years old, and he could not look at me.
“Did you hear me?” Vanessa asked, her voice rising.
She was wearing black Louboutins, the ones with the red soles. I knew because I had seen the credit card statement two months earlier when I helped Daniel organize his desk. One pair had cost more than I used to earn in a month working night shifts at Saint Vincent’s Hospital.
“I heard you,” I said.
The funeral had been that morning.
March in White Plains is cold, the kind of cold that slips through your coat and settles deep in your bones no matter how many layers you wear. I had stood at the graveside in my old wool coat, the navy one I bought in 1998, and watched them lower Daniel into the ground.
Forty years of marriage. Forty years of waking up at 4:30 in the morning to make his coffee before my shift. Forty years of packing his lunches, ironing his shirts, sitting in hospital waiting rooms when his mother had her strokes, holding his hand through his father’s Alzheimer’s, raising Robert while Daniel built his career.
