She’d never heard the upstairs creak just like that. Wonder why, after twenty-six years, three childbirths, two funerals, and a wedding in absentia. Siobhan sat at her white kitchen table, staring at the navy blue-tiled wall and steel countertops. She hated this kitchen, even if this is where she’d spent most of the last quarter century.
She sipped a cup of coffee. Mornings had always been family time. When Martin lived, they’d had big breakfasts every day before he headed off to the hospital to tend patients. Those damned patients, he cared more about them than her. Or did he? She never knew. And then the epidemic of ’18 took him away and she was left to raise Agnes and Patrick. So Annie Kate moved in and started complaining about the way she sautéed vegetables and prepared jellies.
Why’d her mother-in-law have to move in? It’d been Annie Kate who’d turned Agnes into a rebellious young woman. No, girl – Agnes never grew up, Siobhan knew. How else could you explain the way she married that Balmoral man, moved away, and … Siobhan still couldn’t bring herself to think how her only grandchild came into this world. Where had she gone wrong?
She hated Annie Kate for letting Agnes get away, but she got her revenge soon enough -- the old lady had a stroke and lived to realize what a burden she’d become. But then she died. Good riddance, Siobhan thought. She nearly destroyed my family.
What would she do now? Only Patrick remained. He hadn’t worked now four years. When would the Depression end, she asked herself (like everyone else). But Patrick had gotten a job – the new Social Security Administration, he told her – and he was moving to Washington. Siobhan looked around the house. Martin gone, Agnes gone, Annie Kate gone, Patrick soon to be gone. What would it be? Go to Washington with Patrick, or stay here in this empty house?
They were mice creaking about the floors above her.
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