Page 77 of Key West Homecoming

Jake set down the hose.

“He told me to read it here at the kitchen table.”

“Then that’s where you should read it.”

“Would you mind?”

“Emma, it’s your house, go inside. I’ll be in the garden.”

Neither of them knew yet whether the cottage was legally hers. There were lawyers and judges and an original will sitting in a bank in Miami between Emma and that certainty, but Jake had said it without hesitation.

Your house.

“Thank you.”

He held the screen door open for her, and Emma stepped past him into the cottage.

The kitchen was small and bright, with a scrubbed wooden table beneath the window overlooking the herb garden. A blue enamel kettle sat on the stove, and the row of hooks Jake had put up himself held mismatched mugs he’d collected at yard sales. The old pine floor was worn darker near the doorway from decades of people walking through it.

Emma set the envelope on the table.

Behind her, the screen door opened and closed. Jake’s footsteps went down the porch steps, and a moment later she heard him turn on the hose in the back garden.

Emma pulled out the chair on the window side, and a memory came back so clearly that she put one hand on the chair before sitting down.

Gloria had always sat there because she liked looking out at the herbs. Emma had sat across from her when she was eight, drawing pictures on the back of a supermarket flyer while Gloria cut an apple into slices and put them on a plate between them. Emma couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about, but she remembered Gloria laughing.

Emma sat at the table, turned the envelope over, slid a finger beneath the flap and opened it.

The paper inside was heavy cream stationery, folded in thirds and covered on both sides in Gloria’s familiar handwriting. Emma flattened the pages against the table.

My Em,

If you’re reading this, then I’m gone, and Edmund is either sitting near you or has passed you this letter some other way. I hope you’re somewhere quiet. More than that, I hope you’re at the cottage and sitting at the kitchen table. I’d like to think you are.

Let me start with the practical part because I don’t want it hanging over everything else I want to say.

The cottage is yours. I want you to know that clearly.

I signed a will in Miami-Dade County, witnessed by two people who don’t know your uncle and notarized by a woman I picked out of the phone book. The original is in a safe deposit box at Ocean National Bank on Brickell Avenue in Miami. Your name is on the box. Edmund’s name is on it too, so he can go with you if he’s able. If he isn’t, the bank has your name on file.

I also filed a copy of the will with the Monroe County property records and had it attached to the record for the cottage. I wanted a second paper somewhere permanent in case the original was ever lost or hidden. My hope is that you never need it, but I know enough to know that better two of a thing than none.

Now for the harder part.

I know my son. I have known him for sixty years, since the day the nurse handed him to me at Baptist Memorial and I looked at his little red face and loved him like I have loved almost nothing else on this earth.

I don’t want you to misunderstand what I did. I did not stop loving Arthur, and I did not give up on him. I loved him every day of his life, and I suppose I love him now, wherever love goes after we die. But I saw him, Em. A mother can love a son and still see him clearly, and there came a time when I had to stop believing I could fix the parts of Arthur that he had no interest in fixing himself.

What I had left was the cottage.

It was my father’s before it was mine, and your father loved it from the time he was old enough to run barefoot across the porch. By the time you were three and I first put you in the porch swing with a bottle in your fist, I think some part of me already knew it would be yours one day.

I could have left it to Arthur and told myself that was what a mother was supposed to do. I also knew what would happen. He would sell it, the money would be gone before long, and there would be nothing left to show that any of us had spent a summer in that house.

I couldn’t do that.

I left Arthur other things. He has my mother’s china and the two pieces of jewelry that came from my father’s side, which he can sell or keep as he sees fit. He has whatever is left in my savings after the medical bills, although it won’t be as much as he thinks. I did not cut him out, and I don’t want you spending a minute of your life feeling guilty because I didn’t leave him the cottage.