The six-week mark passed. The eight-week mark passed. Patricia found several apartments wanting during this period: one that was too far from her doctor, one that was fine but whose landlord she found unfriendly in the initial showing, one that was the right price but had parking she described as “inadequate for a woman living alone.”
Some of these concerns were real. Some were the concerns of someone who had decided, not consciously, that finding an apartment would mean leaving, and that not finding the right one preserved the option of staying a little longer.
Patricia had sold her previous home. She had the proceeds. She was not destitute. She was not, as far as I could tell, in genuine financial difficulty. What she was, I think, was genuinely anxious about living alone again after the companionship of six years in a community, and genuinely comforted by being in her son’s house, and not particularly incentivized to rush a process she was benefiting from.
I understood this. I even felt it, the part of me that is someone’s daughter and can recognize the particular fear of an older person who is between things and does not want to be alone. I felt it and it did not change the fact that my house had become a different place than the one I’d been living in for five years.
My office door now had a small sign I’d put up, printed from my computer: CALL IN PROGRESS — DO NOT KNOCK. Patricia had knocked twice since I put it up. Once I was not on a call and opened the door. Once I was and did not.