The grass Harold had mowed every Sunday with the attention of a man whose external spaces were under his control even when nothing internal was, had grown past tending, brown at the edges. The curtains were drawn. Ethan’s car, the one with the flat tire that had sat in the driveway for three weeks acquiring dust while he drove mine, was gone, along with my car, both of them absorbed into whatever sequence of repossessions and sales had followed the removal of the credit card that had been funding the life that contained both of them. In the center of the overgrown lawn was a white sign with red lettering that said FORECLOSURE SALE and below that PROPERTY OF THE BANK.
I kept my foot on the gas. I did not look in the rearview mirror because I did not need to. I knew what was behind me. What I was interested in was what was ahead, which was the Italian restaurant and then the apartment and then the balcony where the morning light came in from the east, and in three weeks the Italy trip I had been planning since I booked it, using the money I no longer sent to people who told me I didn’t exist while cashing my checks.
I learned later, through a mutual family friend who still occasionally spoke to both sides, that Sandra and Harold had moved to a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of the city. That Harold’s pension, which he had described to me as barely covering groceries when he called me in a panic on the first of the month, was in fact covering the apartment and the groceries now that it was not being supplemented by a daughter who had made herself invisible in order to make herself useful. That Ethan, twenty-four years old and genuinely talented at exactly nothing he had thus far applied himself to, had gotten a job waiting tables at a diner and was working split shifts to cover his share of the rent, which was the kind of education that no amount of explanation could have delivered as efficiently as hunger.
