My name is Beatrice Eleanor Walsh, though everyone who truly knows me calls me Bea. I’m eighty-two years old now, and I’ve lived through more than most people can imagine—wars and peace, prosperity and hardship, love and loss. I thought by this age that life had taught me all its lessons, that my heart had felt every kind of joy and every shade of sorrow. I was wrong. What happened at my grandson’s wedding last summer proved that even at eighty-two, you can still be surprised by the cruelty of strangers and the fierce loyalty of those who truly love you.
I live alone now in a small cottage on Willow Lane, the same house my husband Henry built with his own two hands back in 1963. It’s modest—just three bedrooms, a kitchen barely big enough for two people, and a living room with windows that rattle when the wind blows hard. But every board, every nail, every carefully fitted doorframe carries Henry’s touch. I can still see him in the summer evenings, his shirt soaked through with sweat, his face flushed from the heat, grinning at me like he’d just won the lottery because he’d finished another wall or installed another window. He had this way of looking at our little house like it was a palace, and somehow, when I stood beside him, I could see it too.
Henry’s been gone nearly twenty years now. Some nights I still reach across the bed, expecting to find him there, warm and solid and real. The empty space never gets easier. Our son, Arthur, followed his father ten years later, taken by the same cancer that seems to run through our family like a dark river. Losing them both felt like having my heart torn out twice, but life doesn’t stop for grief. You keep breathing, keep moving, keep finding reasons to get up in the morning.
My reason was Liam—my grandson, my boy, the last precious piece of my family.
Arthur’s widow, Patricia, remarried eighteen months after the funeral. I don’t judge her for it; grief makes people do what they need to survive. Her new husband was a successful businessman from Tampa, and she was ready for a fresh start somewhere far from the memories. But Liam was only sixteen then, suspended between childhood and adulthood, struggling with his father’s death and his mother’s sudden transformation into someone he barely recognized. Patricia called me one evening in late August, her voice tight with stress and something that might have been relief.
“Beatrice, I need to ask you something,” she said. “Richard’s business is in Florida, and we need to move soon. Liam has two more years of high school here, and I thought… would you consider letting him stay with you? Just until graduation. I don’t want to uproot him when he’s already dealing with so much.”
I nearly dropped the phone in my rush to say yes. The truth was, I needed him as much as he needed me. Maybe more.
Those two years with Liam were among the best of my life. I’d wake before dawn to make his breakfast—scrambled eggs the way he liked them, slightly runny, with toast cut into triangles like I used to do when he was small. I’d pack his lunch with little notes tucked inside: “Remember you’re loved,” or “Make today count,” or sometimes just a smiley face drawn in my shaky handwriting. I went to every parent-teacher conference, every basketball game, every school play. I watched him grow from a gangly, grief-stricken boy into a young man who held doors for elderly neighbors, who volunteered at the food bank on weekends, who called to check on me even when he went away to college.
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