Mother’s House, Mother’s Age

"And I do not want to be the reason you stay."

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

"I do not want to move," Odessa said. "And I do not want to be the reason you stay."

She said it to her daughter Gwen across the kitchen table, with the yellow kettle starting to tick on the stove. Odessa is 92. She has lived in this house for fifty-six years and grew tomatoes along its south fence until last summer, the fence her husband built the first spring they lived here. Gwen is 68. She and her husband Cyrus, 70, have talked for ten years about a town abroad with a mild winter, a train to a bigger city and a one-bedroom apartment at about US$900 a month on a year's lease. That figure is an illustration, but it is the number they use.

Gwen visits her mother on Tuesdays and Saturdays, forty minutes each way. She does the shopping, sorts the pills and sits through the second half of the evening news. She tells herself she will decide after one more winter. She has told herself that for three winters.

Cyrus loves Odessa and has said he would stay if Gwen asked. Gwen's son Jonas lives nearby and would help, but he works long days. Odessa has been asked three times to move: into a small apartment near Gwen, into a home with nurses, and abroad. Each time she gave the same answer. Her bedroom is upstairs. The garden is hers.

"Two things keep me awake," Gwen said. Her voice shook, and she kept her eyes on the kettle. "I am afraid of being on an airplane when the phone rings. And I am afraid of being 75 and still saying next year, with a lease I never signed."

Odessa did not answer for a long moment. Then she reached across and put her thin, spotted hand over Gwen's.

"If you stay until I am a hundred," she said, "I will have taken eight years from you."

Gwen put her forehead on the table and cried. The kettle began to whistle, and neither of them got up for it. Finally Odessa said, "Somebody is going to have to turn that off," and Gwen laughed and wept at once and went to the stove.

They did not settle it that afternoon. But before Gwen left, the two of them made a plan on the back of an envelope. Gwen and Cyrus would go for six weeks in spring on a short rental, which often costs more a month than a year's lease, and not sign for a year. Jonas would take the Tuesdays and Saturdays. A neighbor named Lionel, who already had a key, would look in each morning. Gwen would telephone every evening. When she returned, the three of them would sit at this table and talk again, with six weeks of real days to talk about.

Waiting one more year would make Gwen 69, Cyrus 71 and Odessa 93. Going now would mean being far away if the phone rang.