The lesson is not to stop trusting. I refuse to learn that lesson, and I have told David the same. The lesson is that love should occasionally pick up the phone and ask a direct question, mother to son, without an intermediary, because the people who steal from families do it precisely by making themselves the channel through which the family communicates.
If David had asked me, once, in two years, directly, how do you like the lake house, Mom, the whole thing would have collapsed in an afternoon. He finally asked it at Thanksgiving. It just took him two years to ask his own mother a direct question instead of trusting the person who had made herself the go between.
He asks now. Every week. He calls me himself, not through anyone, and he asks how I am, and I tell him the truth, and that, more than the house or the recovered money, is the thing Victoria actually lost me for two years and then, by her own greed, handed back.
The sunsets over Willow Lake are as good as David promised. I have watched a hundred of them now.
I only wish I’d had the first seven hundred too. But I’ve stopped counting what was taken and started counting what’s left, which my late husband always said was the only arithmetic that ever made anyone happy.
He was right. He usually was.
The heat is on. My son calls on Sundays. And the house by the lake, at long last, is mine.
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