My Mother Left Her House to the Woman Who Delivered Her Groceries, Not to Any of Her Three Children

Part 4: Thursdays

Denise called me the next morning at 7:15. She was still in her hotel room in Findlay. She said she’d talked to Rick most of the night.

“I want to sign my third to Marisol,” she said. “If she takes it.”

“Denise.”

“I mean it, David. I’m not going to fight Mom on this. Mom was right about us. She was right about me. I told her about the mother-in-law unit like I was doing her a favor. Like I was solving a problem. I never asked her once, not once, what her life at the house actually looked like. I never asked her what her days were like. I asked her about her doctor’s appointments. I asked her about her medications. I asked her about the leak in the roof. I never asked her what she was reading. That woman knew what she was reading.”

I sat on the edge of my bed in the Comfort Inn.

“Kyle’s going to lose it,” I said.

“Kyle can lose it. Kyle needs to lose it. Kyle’s been managing Mom since Dad died and he’s never once asked her what she wanted either.”

“He said he doesn’t know what he thinks. That’s the closest Kyle gets to changing his mind.”

Denise was quiet for a second. “I know. I noticed.”

I sat with that.

“I don’t know if Marisol will take it,” I said. “You saw her face.”

“I know.”

“She might really refuse.”

“I know.”

“Then it goes to hospice.”

“Then it goes to hospice, and I hope it helps somebody’s mom the way Marisol helped ours.”

I hung up the phone and I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. Then I put on my coat and I drove to 4418 Bellview.

The house looked the same as it always had. Two-story, gray siding, black shutters, the porch swing my dad hung the year I was born. The driveway hadn’t been plowed since the last snow and there was a foot of white on it.

I let myself in with the key Denise had given me. The house smelled like Mom. Cinnamon and old paper and the lavender lotion she used on her hands.

I walked through the rooms slowly. I hadn’t done this yet. I’d been avoiding it.

In the kitchen, on the table, there was a paperback book with a bookmark in it. The Man Who Died Twice. Richard Osman. There was a coffee mug next to it. Two coffee mugs, actually. Both empty. Both washed and set out to dry on a towel next to the sink.

I stood there and looked at those two mugs for a long time.

On the refrigerator there were photos. My niece Aiden in her soccer uniform. My nephew Bennett at his eighth-grade graduation. Denise’s twins in matching Christmas sweaters. And, tucked into the corner behind a magnet shaped like Ohio, a photo I’d never seen before: a boy of about nine with dark hair and a gap in his front teeth, holding up a math worksheet with a big red A+ on it. He was grinning. Behind him, out of focus, was my mother’s kitchen table.

I took the photo off the fridge and I held it for a minute.

Then I put it back.

—

Marisol called Dennis three days later and said she couldn’t accept the house.

Dennis told us she’d cried on the phone. She said her son had told her they should take it, but she couldn’t do it. She said it would haunt her. She said Elaine’s children needed it more.

Denise flew back to Denver. Kyle went back to work. I drove back to Toledo.

For two weeks nothing happened. Dennis started the paperwork to route the house to the hospice organization. Denise and I texted every day. Kyle went silent.

Then, on a Thursday, Denise called me. She was crying.

“I did something,” she said. “I don’t know if it was right. I did something.”

She’d flown back to Ohio. She’d driven to Bowling Green. She’d found Marisol’s apartment building, the one where the heater didn’t work half the winter. She’d knocked on the door.

Mateo had answered.

Denise said she’d asked if his mom was home, and he’d said she was at work, and Denise had said, that’s okay, I can come back, and Mateo had looked up at her and said, “Are you Miss Elaine’s daughter?”

Denise had said yes.

Mateo had said, “Miss Elaine talked about you. She said you flew across the country to see her. She said you were a good daughter.”

Denise had had to sit down on the hallway floor.

She’d waited two hours in her rental car in the parking lot for Marisol to get home. When Marisol pulled up, Denise had gotten out and Marisol had seen her and stopped in the middle of the parking lot.

Denise told her: I need you to take the house. Not because we can’t have it. Not because we don’t want it. Because my mother wanted you to have it, and I spent forty-nine years not listening to what my mother wanted, and I would like, just once, before it’s too late to matter, to do what she actually asked.

Marisol had cried.

Then she’d said okay.

—

The dinner happened in April, at the house on Bellview. Marisol insisted. She said if she was going to live there, she wanted the first meal in it to be with us.

Kyle almost didn’t come. He told me on the phone the day before that he still thought it was insane, still thought it was wrong, still didn’t understand it. Then he showed up anyway with his wife and both kids and a bottle of wine.

Mateo answered the door. He was wearing a button-down shirt that was slightly too big for him. He shook Kyle’s hand very seriously, the way a nine-year-old does when he’s been told this is important.

Marisol had made pot roast. It was our mother’s recipe. She said Elaine had taught her, on a Thursday in November, and she’d been practicing it ever since.

We ate at the kitchen table. Aiden sat next to Mateo and they talked about Minecraft. Denise asked Marisol about her second job. Kyle didn’t say much, but he ate two helpings, and at one point I saw him looking at the marks on the door frame in the kitchen doorway, the ones our mother had made every year with a pencil, and I saw him touch the one that said Kyle, age 8.

He didn’t say anything. He just touched it. Then he came back to the table.

After dinner, Marisol brought out a book and set it on the table in front of me.

The Thursday Murder Club, book two. The bookmark still in it, three quarters of the way through.

“I couldn’t finish it,” she said. “I’ve tried. I get to where we stopped and I can’t.”

I looked at the book.

“Would you,” she said. “Would you read the rest, and then tell me how it ends. She would have wanted to know.”

I picked up the book. It was warm from being in her hands.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I can do that.”

Outside, somebody was scraping the last of the winter salt off their driveway. In the kitchen, Mateo was showing Bennett a magic trick with a quarter. Denise was helping Marisol with the dishes and they were laughing about something I couldn’t hear.

Kyle came and stood next to me. He looked at the book in my hands. He didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he said, “Thursdays, huh.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He nodded once.

He didn’t apologize. He didn’t say he’d been wrong. He didn’t hug me or hug Marisol or make a toast. That’s not who Kyle is, and I don’t know if that’s who he’ll ever be.

But the next Thursday, he called our mother’s house. Marisol answered. He asked how Mateo was doing in school. He talked to her for eleven minutes.

He’s called every Thursday since.