I turned onto my street and my heart stopped.
There was a moving truck parked in my driveway.
Its rear doors were wide open.
Two men were carrying furniture across my lawn and straight through my wide-open front door.
I had only been gone for one night.
I am Margaret, sixty-eight years old.
And that house is mine.
Just days earlier, on my birthday, my son Jason had raised a champagne glass in front of forty guests.
He smiled and announced I was being pushed out of my own house.
He called it a gift.
For weeks before that, his wife Tiffany had been asking strange questions.
At first I thought she was just nosy.
Then the questions changed.
“Have you updated your paperwork, Margaret?”
“Do you know where your deed is?”
“Have you thought about letting Jason handle things for you?”
“Do you ever get confused about where your important documents are?”
I stopped answering.
I started watching.
Tiffany started borrowing my keys without asking.
Wandering into my bedroom when I was downstairs.
Opening drawers she had no business touching.
Once I came home and found her mother standing in my kitchen making coffee.
While Tiffany was upstairs going through my bedroom drawers.
When I confronted her, she just smiled sweetly.
“You told us we could stop by.”
“I did not.”
She looked at her mother and said, “Are you sure?”
Like I was the one who couldn’t remember.
She had been telling Jason I was becoming forgetful.
