The announcement came at the end of a Sunday dinner, slipped in between clearing the plates and the offer of decaf, as if it were a simple logistical update and not the thing that would rewrite the next several years of my life.
“We’ve been meaning to tell you,” my mother said, in the tone she uses when something has already been decided. “We’re moving in with you for a while. Just until we get settled.”
I looked at my father. He was studying his coffee cup.
“Moving in with me,” I said. Not a question. More like testing the sentence to see if it would hold its shape.
“The house sold faster than we expected,” my mother said. “We close in six weeks.”
Six weeks. And this was the first I was hearing of it.
## What I Already Knew — and What I Didn’t
Here is what I knew going into that dinner: my parents had been talking about selling the house for at least two years. The house in Westfield where my brother Adam and I grew up, the three-bedroom Colonial with the pitched garage roof and the backyard that had seemed enormous when we were children. My father had turned sixty-six in the spring and my mother was sixty-three, and they had started making the kind of sounds that parents make when they are thinking about simplifying — too much yard to maintain, too many stairs for knees that weren’t what they used to be.
I also knew, because Adam had mentioned it in passing at Thanksgiving, that he was planning to open a repair shop. Electronics, he’d said. Phones, tablets, computers, gaming consoles. He’d been doing it informally out of his apartment for three years, building a client base, teaching himself what he didn’t already know, keeping careful notes on what people needed and what they were willing to pay. He had a vision for a small storefront in a strip mall on the commercial corridor two miles from our parents’ house. He was thirty-two and he’d been working toward this longer than I’d realized.