I handed her a hundred dollars anyway.
She handed fifty back.
“You’re stubborn.”
“So are you.”
“Good. We’ll get along.”
By noon, my little apartment had furniture.
An eighty-dollar solid-wood dining table from Facebook Marketplace.
A hundred-and-twenty-dollar sofa from an estate sale.
A used bed frame.
New mattress.
Lamps from Target.
White curtains.
A coffee maker.
Four plates.
Four mugs.
One good frying pan.
Two saucepans.
I owned less than I had owned in Michael’s house.
Yet everything around me belonged exactly where I wanted it.
That first night, I sat beside the window with tea.
Nobody asked what I was doing.
Nobody sighed because I had the television too loud.
Nobody told me they needed the kitchen.
Nobody reminded me that the house was theirs.
At 10:30, I locked my door.
One lock.
One click.
Mine.
The next morning, I woke at nine.
That alone felt illegal.
At Michael’s house, I was always up by six-thirty because Samantha liked breakfast before work.
I made coffee.
Toast.
Scrambled eggs.
I ate beside the window overlooking the park.
Halfway through breakfast, I started laughing.
I was using my own electricity.
Scandalous.
My phone sat on the table.
No new message from Michael.
For three weeks, nothing.
Then one afternoon, I saw Samantha at Kroger.
She was standing near the produce section with a shopping cart.
We made eye contact.
Neither of us smiled.
She turned her cart around and went toward dairy.
I bought tomatoes.
That was it.
No confrontation.
No speech.
No dramatic showdown beside the avocados.
I walked home with my groceries and realized I had not been afraid of her.
A month after I moved, Carol invited several women over for dinner.
Her niece Paige came.
So did Helen, one of Carol’s cousins, and two women from the building.
Six of us squeezed around my secondhand dining table eating chicken, roasted potatoes and salad.
At one point Paige asked, “Okay, Eleanor. You got the apartment. What’s next?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dream number two.”
I laughed.
“I’m sixty-eight.”
Helen pointed her fork at me.
“My mother is eighty-two. She started swimming lessons this year.”
Everyone laughed.
Paige leaned forward.
“Seriously. What do you want?”
Nobody had asked me that in years.
What did I want?
Not what Michael needed.
Not what Samantha preferred.
Not what the house required.
Me.
“I don’t know.”
“Then figure it out,” Carol said.
So I did.
I joined a knitting class at the community center.
I started walking through the park every morning.
I bought a library card.
Carol and I made Wednesday lunch our weekly tradition.
Sometimes we cooked.
Sometimes we spent twenty dollars at a diner and complained about how coffee now cost more than lunch used to.
I even bought myself new shoes.
Not practical orthopedic shoes.
Nice shoes.
Blue leather flats I saw at Dillard’s.
I stood in the store staring at the price tag for five minutes.
Then I remembered I had spent forty years saving money and twenty years asking permission to enjoy anything.
