Wilting roses dropped creamy pink petals on the sweat-ring-decorated dining room table. The house was heavy with the scent of the flowers, and it mixed with the lingering smell of my mother’s friends and caretakers, who all seemed to wear the same stifling floral perfume. I cracked a window and slid into the breakfast nook beside Jamie.

    He leaned over a stack of medical bills and life insurance brochures. For the last week, he’d been elbow deep in my mother’s financial affairs. It wasn’t something he asked for with a smile, but a burden he offered to bear for me so that I could grieve in some semblance of peace. Of course, he’d been bearing the weight of it for months, ever since the hospital let us know we were approaching a hospice situation with my mother’s care.

    Until then, she’d been comfortable and well-taken care of. Her meds were stable, and while her blood pressure and potassium wavered from time to time, she was in decent shape physically. It was her mental affliction that kept her hospitalized full-time.

    For the last ten years, she’d been a resident at the North Lake Hospital. It was a private facility, and we were lucky to have afforded it, especially in San Diego. Neither of us would have been equipped to deal with her delusions or hallucinations on our own. Instead, we managed her care as much as we could and made sure we paid the bills so she could stay under the watchful eye of trained professionals.

    Her home, however, had fallen by the wayside. She refused to sell it, and despite us having power of attorney; we didn’t want to push it. To us, it was still her home and her decision. In the end, we ended up sitting on a layer of dust at her weathered oak table while we attempted to pick up the pieces after her funeral, which was a lonely one at that.

    I rested my hand on Jamie’s, twisting his wedding ring around his finger. He still had a scab on his knuckle from a woodworking incident a week earlier. His hair was a mess, with the longer pieces falling like curtains in front of his tired, bloodshot eyes. He flipped a spreadsheet over, checked it with a bank statement, and checked it again. Whatever he was reading wasn’t adding up, judging by the tight-knit wrinkle between his brows.

    “What is it?”

    He shook his head and ran his fingers through the graying hair at his temples. It looked like ribbons of silver against the dark mahogany tones he still clung to everywhere else.

    “This check for taxes here. Your mom doesn’t own property somewhere, does she?”

    “No, nothing besides this place I don’t think.”

    “You don’t think?”     

    I bit the inside of my lip and wracked my brain. She had purchased nothing besides this house after my dad passed away, but I was pretty young, and she wasn’t one for including me in all her decisions, especially when she was well.

    “Let’s just check the safe. If she has anything, which I doubt she does, it will be in there,” I offered.

    He sighed and closed his eyes. I felt bad that he was in charge of her affairs, but also relieved that he took it on. She would have preferred him to do it anyway. He was the more pragmatic and thorough half of our marriage, and she knew what she was doing when she suggested it months prior in a rare moment of lucidity.

    Mom’s bedroom was bare, aside from the grotesque floral wallpaper that hadn’t been changed since 1984. All of her knickknacks had been taken to her room at the hospital. Even her bed was empty, with only a yellowed white drop cloth tossed over it to protect it from the fine layer of dust coating the house’s entrails. We went to her closet with its creaky accordion doors and opened it to reveal a small fire safe on the floor. It rested on a square of orange shag carpet to protect the hardwood from the safe’s sharp edges.

    I knelt and rested my fingers on the dial, hesitating for a second to remember the combination. My birthday, hers, and dad’s… 31, 19, 21.

    Click.

    The door swung open with a creak and a handful of receipts toppled out with a stack of envelopes. She was never one to throw out unnecessary documents, no matter how much clutter they added. Jamie reached for the stack of papers and withdrew one Manila envelope. If there was anything worth finding, it was in there. Nothing else looked remotely important. It was wrapped with a skinny green string to secure its worn opening. He unwound it and tore into the official-looking package like a kid on Christmas.

    He pulled a few smaller envelopes out. From the outside, they looked to be her marriage license and her and dad’s birth certificates. I assumed it was a bust, and he’d be wracking his brain over the checking account discrepancy all weekend, but the very last envelope he withdrew had a return address I didn’t recognize.

    “Marlinton, West Virginia?” I muttered to myself. Jamie’s eyebrows peaked, and he pulled the delicate envelope open to reveal its contents.

    Two documents were folded into one another. One was a deed, the other a will for a ‘Ms. Freda Reynolds.’

    “Reynolds?” Jamie ran his fingers over the name, which was written in heavy blue ink. “Your relative?”     

    “I don’t know. I mean, I guess so. Mom was related to some Reynolds, but only by marriage, and it was pretty distant. I don’t know how she would have ended up with this. What else does it say?”

    Jamie cleared his throat and began reading the will. “The estate and its contents, with the exception of one property in West Virginia, of Ms. Freda Reynolds is to be left to her next of kin, Miss Claire Reynolds. Ms. Freda Reynolds has requested that the property in West Virginia be left to her third cousin, Ms. Helen Pratt.” He scanned the rest of the paper without reading out loud, then flicked his warm brown eyes back to me.

    “What’s that mean?”

    “It seems, since you are the sole beneficiary to your mom’s estate, that you are now the owner of a property in West Virginia.”

    “What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Do I have to pay the taxes?    Jamie smiled and shook his head. “No. You don’t have to worry about that. At least not yet. That’s what I was trying to figure out earlier. Your mother had apparently paid them in advance, way in advance. As far as I can tell, you don’t have to do anything with it right now if you don’t want to. Save it for a rainy day,” he said with a shrug and went to work stuffing the documents back into their envelope.

    And so we went on like that for days. I boxed up the remnants of her life while he sorted files and wrote checks for any unpaid expenses, though they were few. My mother, however, scattered in her final years, had enough sense to pay an accountant to take care of most of her affairs. Often, I wondered how one’s mind could fail them in some ways while acting like a well-oiled machine in others. She’d hyperfocus on finances and speak to her hallucinations about them if they were patient enough to listen. Who knows? Maybe they were.

    We were pulling sixty, sometimes seventy, hours a week in the month following her funeral. Jamie almost had the entire estate wrapped up, escrow and all, when he came home from the office with a mournful scowl plastered across his face. I wouldn’t have noticed, but his brown eyes were sunken and red, as though he’d had a good cry in the last hour.

    “What’s wrong?” I asked, as I smoothed the last piece of packing tape over a box I was sending to consignment.

    “You’re going to hate me.”

    Dread gripped my throat and squeezed as I fought to swallow. What was it? What could be so bad that he looked like he just killed a puppy? My mind flashed to images of him in the throes of heat with another woman. An affair? When? It was the only reason I could fathom hating the man, but I couldn’t gather when he’d actually have time for an affair. It made little sense.

    “Just tell me,” I finally said.

    “Joe, at work, you know?”

    “Joe, your boss?”

    “Yeah... We, uh, I should say, I had it out with him.”

    He’s making a fuss over an argument? The fire in my belly calmed as I tried to work out why he was making such a big deal. His work was stressful. They’d had arguments before, and I couldn’t understand why he was freaking out now. “Had it out? What do you mean?”

    “We had a serious disagreement about one of our accounts.” Jamie cleared his throat and gripped a tuft of his hair at the back of his head. He refused to look me in the eye. Serious disagreement? I wondered what constituted a serious disagreement. Maybe Joe kicked him off the account or put him on another marketing team.

    “And?”

    “I quit, Mel.” The words were sharp as a gunshot, but my thoughts were wild and twisty, like vines of ivy snaking through my head. I tried to imagine what the loss would look like for us. Would we be able to afford to live in San Diego? My mom’s house was already pending, and it would have been hard to walk back on that all-cash deal, especially in this market. I didn’t want to live there anyway, so abandoning our condo was out of the question.

    Just then, he interrupted my thoughts, which were already reeling, spiraling into the pit of despair, “Stop it.”

    “Stop?” I asked, confusion lacing my voice.

    “I can see it on your face. You’re trying to figure out how you can carry us.”

    My vision clouded the minute the words left his lips, like an ominous cloud swallowing me up. A scorching heat gripped the back of my neck, and I sucked in a breath before I allowed myself to speak. “Someone has to,” I seethed, but immediately regretted. His big round eyes drew down, holding sorrow and regret within them like saucers filled to the brim. I swallowed my rage and took another deep breath. “Jamie, how are we going to do this? I can’t support us with my writing work alone.”

    We had a mortgage, insurance, loads of medical bills, student loans, utilities... My gig work wouldn’t put a dent in monthly expenses. Sure, the money from Mom’s house would offer a buffer, but it wasn’t sustainable. I imagined us trying to juggle our bills and cut our lives down to the absolute bare necessities. It looked grim, to be honest, to go from living comfortably to eating bologna sandwiches so we could afford fertility treatments and electricity. And if we could get pregnant and stay pregnant, would we even be able to afford a baby?

    He nodded in agreement, but didn’t lift his eyes to mine. So, while speaking to the floor, he said, “I have an idea, but I need you to trust my judgment.”

    Judgment? Trust him? How dare he waltz into our living room and ask me to trust him after he blew up our lives in a matter of seconds? The past year had been literal hell for both of us. My mother’s health declined, and I spent every weekend by her side when my work allowed me. His schedule was no better.

    And despite it all, we’d been trying, in earnest, to conceive a baby and were forcing sex as if it were a chore. Our efforts were fruitless, though. We’d achieved pregnancy several times, but every promise soured into heartbreak within weeks. In short, our marriage was as tangled and unruly as rusted barbed wire after the careless neglect of the past year. I wasn’t sure it could weather financial hardship, not when it was already this strained.

    As much as I appreciated his help with my mother’s finances, it was the first genuinely warm gesture he’d shown me in months. The rest was mechanical. We wanted a baby, we wanted a comfortable life, and so, we went through the motions. And now he wanted me to trust his judgment when the intimacy between us was waning more and more by the day?

A quiet resentment simmered inside of me, bubbling and popping like a molten brew, but I took a deep breath and quashed what I could. He was still my husband. And if I was completely honest with myself, he’d never led me astray. Sure, he ignored my emotions all too often, but when it really counted, he was always logical.

“What’s your plan?” I finally relented.

###

He laid it all out there over two cups of coffee and lots of tears. I tore into him with a tongue lashing fit for a criminal. In reality, he probably didn’t deserve it. I’d done my fair share of stupid, and he’d always been there to back me up. What kind of wife would I have been if I couldn’t peer through my emotions and see his point of view objectively? I could try, at least.

His boss was an ass, and we both knew he hated that job. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have marketable skills. It was literally his job. With any luck, he could even work from home if he chose, running campaigns remotely and devoting the rest of his time to household projects.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think his plan to sell our condo along with my mom’s house and move to her property in West Virginia was insane. I mean, West Virginia? We had no idea who the distant relative was that left her the land, or the state of what was there. Freda Reynolds was an intriguing family mystery, sure, but I wasn’t certain I wanted to move into the remnants of her life. I wasn’t a hermit crab. Could I really just move into this abandoned shell and pick it up as if no one ever left it?

“You really think we can do this?” I searched for an inkling of doubt in his eyes, but he was resolute. He must have already gone through all the stages before running the plan by me. Denial, grief, acceptance... He was focused on selling it now. If there was one thing Jamie Hayes was good at, it was selling. He had a face for it with an electric smile that clients ate up like candy.

“Come on, you can go freelance, and I’ll find something else. Having a property without a huge mortgage will buy us some time too.” He wasn’t wrong about that part, but we were looking at a major, cross-country move, and there was still the business of quitting my job, finding a new fertility specialist, selling all of our furniture, and getting in contact with the holding company that had been doing upkeep on the property in West Virginia.

We’d only just discovered their phone number on a scrap of paper tucked inside the will. After some digging, Jamie realized Mom was paying them a small yearly fee to check the pipes and roof for leaks. Her forethought astounded me. Maybe she meant to do something with the property and never got around to it.

I took a long sip of my coffee, breathing in the hazelnut and vanilla as my thoughts floated back to work. “Alexis will be such a bitch about me quitting. Is it even worth it?”

“You’ve always said you wanted to cut back, you know, simplify. You could finally live out those crazy cottage fantasies like those accounts you follow on Instagram” He formed air quotes around “simplify” and grinned like an over-enthusiastic car salesman. I didn’t respond. It was easier to nurse the last few cold sips of coffee from my mug. At the bottom, leftover grounds of the specialty blonde brew I picked up at Whole Foods stared back at me. For a moment, I wished I was one of those witchy types that could decipher some life-changing meaning from the way they swirled and washed up on the side of the handmade pottery, but all I saw was disappointment in my generic coffee filters.