Bryce called on the Monday before Thanksgiving, while I was standing in my kitchen in Rockford, Illinois, still wearing my work boots.
I’d spent the whole day on a ladder inside an old storefront on East State Street, pulling out wiring that had been put in sometime around the Eisenhower administration. Cloth-covered. Brittle. The kind of wire that crumbles in your hands and makes you wonder how the building never burned down. My shoulders ached. There was plaster dust in my hair and a cut on my left thumb from a junction box with a sharp edge.
My tool bag was sitting beside the back door where I always drop it. Upstairs, a clean blouse was hanging on the closet door. Blue, with little white buttons. I’d bought it on Saturday at the Kohl’s on East State for a visit I thought we were still planning.
The phone buzzed on the counter. BRYCE. I smiled before I picked it up. I always do.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
“Hey, Mom.” He sounded distracted. “Caroline and I want to come by Wednesday. Talk about wedding stuff.”
“Of course,” I said. “Should I make dinner? I could do the pot roast. Caroline liked the pot roast.”
“Maybe.”
Behind him, glasses clinked. Somebody laughed. A man’s voice, deep and pleased with itself. Then a woman’s laugh, higher.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Madison,” he said. “We just had dinner with Caroline’s parents.”
I reached for the calendar on the wall beside my refrigerator. The free one from the hardware store. November was a photo of a red barn in the snow.
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know you were meeting them this week.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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