“I just like to make sure everyone makes it out alive before I get too invested, Martha,” he said. His voice was so soft, so reasonable. “If the ending is miserable, I don’t want to waste my time getting attached to people who are going to break my heart.”

He laughed, a quiet, rumbling sound, and put the book in our basket. He did that with everything. He wanted to know the destination before he took the trip. He was a man who hated surprises. He liked his world orderly, predictable, and safe.

We spent forty-four years in this house. We bought it in 1979, back when the street was just gravel and the oak trees in the backyard were barely taller than me. Arthur paid twelve thousand dollars for it, using every single cent he had saved from his paper route as a boy and his first job at the mill.

He was so proud of this place. Every Saturday morning, he would put on his dusty overalls and walk around the perimeter with a hammer, checking the siding, tapping the foundation, making sure everything was holding together. He wasn’t a professional carpenter, but he cared. He cared about every nail.

I remember when Richard was born. Arthur stood in the doorway of this very kitchen, holding that tiny bundle, looking out at the yard. He told me he wanted to build a swing set under the big maple tree. And he did. He built it out of heavy pine beams that he sanded by hand until his palms were raw. He didn’t want Richard getting a single splinter.

Richard didn’t see any of that. Or maybe he chose to forget. By the time he was eighteen, he only saw the old paint peeling on the garage and the fact that we didn’t have a paved driveway.

He was embarrassed when his friends came over. He would ask us to park our old Buick around the corner so nobody would see it.

Arthur never got angry about it. He would just smile, adjust his glasses, and say, “The boy has big dreams, Martha. There is nothing wrong with having dreams.”

But there is a difference between having dreams and being greedy.

After Arthur passed, Richard didn’t even wait for the funeral flowers to wilt before he started talking about the listing price. He sat right at our dining room table, drinking my coffee, and showing me photos of senior apartments. He kept using the word “efficiency” like it was a good thing. He said I didn’t need three bedrooms anymore. He said the yard was too much work for a woman my age.