This house on Maplewood Avenue used to breathe with me. I can still feel the realtor’s smile warming the foyer, the brass keys scratching my palm, the way the door swung into light and dust and a future I could almost taste. Duncan was thirteen—elbows and appetite—touching everything as if our name were already carved into the doorframe.
“Is this really ours, Mom?” he asked, sliding his hand along the banister like it might sing. “Yes, baby. Ours,” I said, and the word felt like a lock turning from the inside.
I never guessed the same boy would sit across my kitchen table thirty‑eight years later and decide I should leave. My name is Lillian Trent. Seventy‑six.
Birmingham, Alabama. I spent most of my life dressing windows and endcaps for Sterling’s Department Store. It wasn’t glamorous, but it taught me two truths that will carry or crush you depending on how you meet them: quality and money.
Quality is a seam that never splits and a hinge that never squeals. Money is a light bill paid on time and a mortgage clawed down year after year no matter who runs off with a secretary and a shoebox full of promises. Harold left when Duncan still smelled like baby shampoo.
I learned the price of solitude and the courage of spaghetti three nights running, reinvented with butter, pepper, and a lie called “special.” I learned to sign a thirty‑year note with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking and to read the back pages of the paper where the numbers live. I vowed I would never owe a man another breath. So I cut coupons, bought my winter coat in January, and funneled what I could into accounts no one asked about.
The library taught me index funds. I bought a muni bond after two trips to the reference desk. Small amounts at first.
Then more. By forty‑five the house on Maplewood was mine outright. By fifty I had savings.
By sixty I could’ve quit, but the store felt like a town square—perfume‑counter gossip, seamstress steam, boys in their first suits, girls in prom silk. Work is a kind of company. I told no one about the money.
Not the women I played bridge with. Not Eleanor, who knows almost everything. Not Duncan.
Especially not Duncan. After Harold, my finances became the one room in the house where I closed the door. Maplewood had bones like a hymn: two stories, four bedrooms, a porch swing that learned our weight, a backyard that smelled of tomato vines before a storm.
On Saturdays I knelt in the soil. On Sundays I brewed tea and let neighbors wander in. Duncan did fine.
Auburn. A job at an insurance company. He learned to say “deliverables” without laughing.
Life kept its lane. We were okay. Then he met Priscilla Norfolk.
Sales at the same firm. Manicure perfect, smile perched on her face like a guest who refuses the chair. Six months dating, three months engaged, a church wedding with Costco lilies, a honeymoon in Destin.
Efficient. Not unkind, but clipped. They came one Sunday for roast chicken and green beans and Duncan’s favorite yeast rolls.
Priscilla folded her napkin into a perfect square and set it just so. “Mom,” Duncan said, eyes flicking to her. “Priscilla and I were thinking.
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