He was quiet for a while.
Then he tried the usual direction.
“She wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“She just thought it would be simpler this way.”
“She didn’t mean it how it sounded.”
I looked at him directly.
I told him that I had heard her perfectly clearly.
I told him that for eight months, I had watched his wife rearrange my home, claim my rooms, and use my patience as evidence that she could do whatever she liked without consequence.
I told him that I had waited during all of those eight months for my son to say something.
Anything.
And that what he had said instead on Tuesday morning was that he had already thought about it and figured I’d be fine leaving my own bedroom.
I told him that his access code expired Friday at midnight.
And that I hoped he would use the time before then to arrange alternative accommodations for Maxine’s family.
He sat there for a long time looking at the table.
Then he picked up his bag and went upstairs.
He and Maxine had words.
I heard the murmur of it through the ceiling.
And whatever she said to him, it didn’t change anything.
Because when he came back down an hour later, he made himself a sandwich and ate it in silence.
And that was the end of Thursday.
Friday arrived.
Maxine was on her phone by eight in the morning with the particular brittleness of someone managing a situation that is going wrong in ways they cannot quite acknowledge.
She spoke to Bianca.
She spoke to her mother.
She seemed to be smoothing something over but would not say what.
I made my coffee and read the paper.
I took a walk down to the park before the temperatures dropped.
I stopped at Tim Hortons on the way home and had a second cup standing at the counter, looking out at the gray October street.
When I got back, I opened the app on my phone and canceled Brody’s access code.
I did it without ceremony.
It needed to be done before he could use it to let anyone in while I was out.
Then I set the house back to what it was meant to be.
I moved my reading chair back into the sunroom where it belonged.
In the corner by the south window.
I carried Maxine’s standing desk to the spare room.
I found my grandmother’s lamp.
She had moved it to a shelf to make room for a decorative piece she had ordered.
I put it back on the side table in the living room where it had stood for 15 years.
I reset the thermostats to my preferred temperature throughout.
I had been paying a noticeably higher hydro bill since spring because Maxine kept the house four degrees warmer than I liked.
A detail I had not mentioned.
But one I thought about now.
As I turned each dial back, I returned my books to the shelf.