Jim came to my door in August with his cap in his hands. It took him ten minutes to get it said.
“You take until November, Judy. You take longer if you need it.”
“I won’t need longer,” I told him. “That house was always yours, Jim. You’ve been good to me past what anybody could ask.”
So that was that. Nobody was the villain in it. A young family needed a house. And I was a widow living alone in five rooms that belonged to somebody else.
That’s how I came to be sitting in my car in front of my daughter’s split-level, with a piece of notebook paper in my purse that said my keep was worth eight hundred dollars a month.
I started the car. I was going to drive home. I had every intention of it.
Instead, I drove four blocks and parked in front of the feed store.
