My mother surprised me. She walked through the unit slowly, looked at the courtyard from the back window, sat in the primary bedroom for a moment as if she were testing the light.
“There’s a pool,” my father said, reading a brochure he’d picked up at the leasing office.
“I know,” she said.
“The rent is fifteen hundred,” I said. “All utilities included except electric.”
My mother looked at me. Her expression was something I couldn’t quite read — not the expression from the I’ve-already-decided conversations, and not the hurt expression from the room-measurement conversation. Something more complicated than either.
“It’s not the house,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
“But it’s nice,” she said.
“It is,” I said. “It really is.”
## The Decision They Made
My parents put in an application for the over-fifty-five community. It took ten days to process. They were approved. The move-in date was set for six days before their house closing, which meant a brief overlap of about three days in which they would technically have two homes — a quirk of timing that my father found faintly amusing and my mother found faintly absurd.
Adam paid the deposit. He called me to tell me he’d done it, not to my parents before doing it. I don’t know why he called me first — maybe to make sure he was doing the right thing, or maybe just to tell someone who would understand what it had cost him to do it.
“That was good of you,” I said.