Patricia came in September. She had sold her smaller house — the one she’d moved into after Daniel’s father died six years ago, a two-bedroom in a development sixty miles away — and was between things. Between homes, she said. Looking for a rental that would suit her. She’d had an offer on a place that fell through in August. The market was difficult. She needed a landing spot for a few weeks.
Four weeks was what Daniel told me. He asked if it was okay, and I said yes, because four weeks is a definite period of time with a known end and also because Patricia and I had always gotten along in the specific way of people who see each other at holidays and agree on most things and have never been tested by proximity.
I said yes to four weeks. I want to be accurate about this. I agreed.
What I did not agree to was indefinite. What I did not agree to was permanent. What I did not agree to was the rearrangement of the kitchen cabinets, the meal schedule set without discussion, the calendar of family visits organized as though our house were the obvious venue for any gathering of more than two Bennetts. What I did not agree to was being made to feel, in the house I owned and had lived in for five years, like the one who needed to explain herself.
But all of that came gradually, which is why it took me longer than it should have to name it.