By Carol Roper

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Pink sunrise bathed the mountains and valley outside the plate glass kitchen windows of Lucy Curtis and Greg Green’s custom-built hillside home on the North Pacific Coast of Mexico. Despite Greg’s misgivings about the country, life there had been problem-free with one exception.

Lucy sat on a ladder-back chair in the kitchen nook, her laptop opens on the desk she usually used for grocery lists and weekly calendars, on a video call with her mother, Ruth Curtis, on the monitor. Her face appeared smooth and creamy for a woman in her eighties. This was the result of surgery to remove a skin cancer that Ruth had treated and failed to heal with Aloe Vera Gel.

“If your father knew about this—” Ruth turned her head, revealing the opposite side of her face: mottled, wrinkled, loose skin of someone who’d spent years on the golf course absent a hat or sunscreen.

“What are you looking at?” she demanded.

“I’m listening, Mom.”

Her mother refused cosmetic surgery to have both sides of her face match because Medicare insurance didn’t pay for voluntary procedures, only those that were a medical necessity. The bureaucratic absurdity infuriated her mother, and such was her integrity and stubbornness that she refused to pay or allow Lucy to pay to make her face whole.

Unlike her mother, Lucy shied away from confrontations. She “went along to get along.” Now, however, circumstances were different. She had not wanted to place her mother at the Hacienda, but after the stabbing incident, she had no choice.

“How long are you and your rotten husband going to keep me prisoner in Mexico? Are you listening or staring at the Phantom of the Opera side of my two faces?”

There was no use trying to dodge the question, since one apparent side effect of her mother’s concussion was an almost prescient ability to read minds.

“You are literally two-faced, Mom. It’s a grabber.”

“I’d like to grab you and shake sense into your head. You can’t see the truth about your husband.”

“Mom, I visit you every day. If you’re not satisfied, if there’s a problem, we should report it to Dr. Gutierrez. She lives right there and speaks perfect English.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s fine. You. Not here. You. You’re abusing me with involuntary imprisonment.”

Lucy rubbed her forehead.

“Your father would shit his pants if he knew.”

“Dad wore diapers.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Sort of, but it’s a fact.”

“You’ve changed. You’re not the same since you married that son of a bitch. You should’ve stayed single; I don’t know why you married.”

“I was fifty-one, not getting any younger. My friends have grandkids.”

“It took you a long, long time to get over James.” Lucy’s first love, a rising composer, died in a motorcycle crash when they were both young.

“Such a tragedy. He was one of a kind,” she sighed.

“He was, Mom. Everyone agreed. If I hadn’t met Greg, I’d probably have remained unmarried.”

“He was so special?” she asked in a tone that meant the opposite.

“Greg? I don’t know. He was a widower, young—”

“I don’t like the way he talks down to you. His wife probably died to get away from him.”

“Mom,” Lucy’s voice held a warning. “His kids were grown. I liked them. They liked me.”

“And you didn’t want to get old alone.”

“Yes, I suppose that was a factor. I admit it, but he’s a good man. He doesn’t often show his emotions, but he’s a good guy. He spent months in his woodworking shop making toys for the village kids.”

“Yeah, he’s a fucking saint.”

“I know you don’t like him—”

“He can’t wait for me to die and you inherit my holdings. Your father would never forgive you for putting me here.”

“Mom, he had a triple bypass. Give him a break, okay?”

“They bypassed his empathy. You don’t need his permission. It’s your money, sis. And I sure hope you had a prenup. He’s the one who doesn’t want me around. There are laws against elder abuse, even in Mexico.”

“What abuse?”

“I don’t like where I am and I’m not free to leave because you are my guardian and put me here.”

“That’s true, and I was very careful to find a place that’s small and like a hotel.”

“I can check out of a hotel. I can’t do that here.”

“And Dr. Gutierrez lives on the premises. She has dual medical licenses and speaks English.”

“Yes, she’s a regular fucking Mexican Florence Nightingale.”

“Florence Nightingale was the founder of nursing; Dr. Gutierrez is a doctor. There are six people there. It’s fifteen minutes from Rancho La Puerta. I can ride my horse on the beach to visit you.”

“You finished?” her mother asked.

“I guess.”

“Your father is turning over in his grave. He would never forgive you.”

Lucy might never forgive herself, she thought.

Family lore was that when Lucy was six years old, sitting on the counter of her father’s dry-cleaning store in the East Bronx—a front for his money laundering and loan shark businesses—while he was in the rear of the store, a young man entered with a dry-cleaning receipt, wrote a message on the back, and gave it to Lucy, telling her to give it to her father. Just before he left, he turned to her and said, “This is your lucky day, little girl.” As directed, Lucy gave the written message to her father. Lucy remembers none of this story.

She was told when she graduated from college, when her father showed her a stock portfolio valued at two million dollars in trust for her and told her the story.

It was when Lucy’s affable father slipped into the embrace of Alzheimer’s, which would be his final and most costly mistress, and Lucy became her parents’ guardian, that she learned the extent of her father’s financial entanglements and the truth. Her account was one of his tax shelters. Through the years she used the interest paid but never touched the principle, and it continued to grow.

The cost of his Alzheimer’s care was a hundred thousand dollars a year and climbing. If her father lived long enough, the very real possibility existed that they would not have sufficient income for their needs. Lucy would never permit that to happen to her parents. She convinced her husband to let her build a private extension to their house for her parents that she would pay for. Greg reluctantly agreed. Less than four months later, a one-bedroom complete with facilities for a senior with infirmities was ready.

The move seemed to have a reviving effect on her father at first. Lucy had a precious eighteen months before he left them.

That is when things got dicey with Ruth. She fell outside and had a concussion. She recovered, but the concussion changed her personality. She began having rage attacks, accused Lucy of trying to poison her, claimed her daughter was not hers but adopted, the illegitimate daughter of one of her father’s lovers.

Lucy began to wonder if there was any truth to her mother’s accusation. Lucy had a DNA test. She showed the results to her mother.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“To prove I’m your daughter.”

“Of course, you’re my child, my only child. Where would you get the crazy idea that you weren’t from my flesh and blood?”

“From you, Mom, from you,” Lucy thought and smiled at the indication her mother’s brain was functioning normally again.

It was the time her mother stabbed Lucy in the arm with a kitchen knife that ended Greg’s tolerance. “She has to go,” he said in a tone that meant it.

“Mom, I’m doing the best I can…”

Ruth cut her off. “You should have let me stab him.”

“It would have been worse, Mom. You’d be in jail.”

“Yeah, he’s real letter-of-the-law type. I just feel terrible you stepped in front of the knife and got cut.”

Lucy raised her shirt to expose her ribs. “Nothing, not even a scar. Don’t worry about it.”

A frontal view of her mother’s two-sided face showed on the monitor. “We’ll talk about it when I come by. We’ll go to Susannah’s for lunch.”

“Mexico is too damn noisy.” Ruth leaned forward, peering into the camera. “I don’t like it. Get me out of here. I’ll go back to Yonkers.”

“And live alone in that big house?”

“Or I can live in the apartment you built. I’ll just be more careful when I go on the patio.”

“I already had Greg install a six-foot fence around it.”

“Even better.”

“This is your father’s fault. He always protected you from reality.”

He tried, Lucy thought, but as an observant teen she figured out how they were different from her classmates’ families at the tony Manhattan private school she attended, to, as her mother told her, “Meet a better class of people.”

But a better class of people recognize who is eligible for inclusion in their group and who are superficially included, as Lucy was in school activities but not in their private Manhattan homes with doormen, paneled elevators, and marble entries. Lucy recognized the differences. Her classmates’ fathers worked on Wall Street, owned fabric companies, had law firms. They wore tailored suits and did not have a shoulder holster under their jacket with a pistol tucked in it. In the gym locker room, she once heard girls gossiping about her father as a member of the “Kosher Nostra.” Only once was she asked for a date by a classmate who, even before they arrived at the party, was pawing at her, telling her he knew outer-borough girls were horny. In a surge of teenage bravado, she told him her father’s chauffeur would kill him if the boy didn’t take her immediately home. He did and Lucy fibbed to her mother that she had a stomachache and that is why she was back so early.

“I know a lot more than you think,” Lucy replied. Worried she might end up like her father or mother, though Ruth’s was a traumatic brain injury, not a disease, Lucy learned Spanish and Italian online to add new circuits to her brain, ate a high-fiber diet, and practiced self-improvement as religiously as if she were Oprah.

“Yeah, do you know who your dear husband voted for? No. You keep telling yourself he’s not a fascist.”

“He’s Jewish.”

“You think we’re born inoculated? You think there are no self-hating Jews?”

“I think you don’t like Greg.”

“Who says? I think he’s a fucking saint. He married you when you when I’d given up trying to find you a husband.”

Lucy’s mind began to drift, she revived as she heard the front door open relieved that Greg had returned from his walk. Soon they’d have morning coffee together. And then she’d walk down the hill to the Rancho La Puerta corral where her horse Lucinda was stabled and saddle up for a nice long ride in the hills.

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Stepping into their light-filled entry, Greg Green caught the sound of his mother-in-law’s gruff voice and knew his wife was being emotionally pummeled again. He didn’t understand why his wife was unable to set a boundary with her mother. It wasn’t Lucy’s fault that she took a dive off their patio and had a head injury. Truthfully, his mother-in-law was no picnic before she fell down a hill into a rabbit hole in her mind. He and Ruth had never liked each other.

His mother-in-law thought he’d married for money, but Greg was well off. He’d retired from an aerospace company with a fat portfolio and pension. He owned a three-unit building in Santa Monica, California, and was long divorced. His three children were grown, and he was a grandfather. No, he married Lucy because she loved him, was sexy, and had a sly backhand that saved many of their doubles tennis matches.

The only opinion Greg and Ruth shared was that he too didn’t like Mexico—the food, the sewer smell that emitted from even the best neighborhoods. The concept of “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure” was unknown or ignored in Mexico. Dogs were allowed to do whatever dogs were prone to do, mainly shitting and reproducing, despite his wife’s and like-minded neighbors’ attempts to capture and have them neutered. Through Greg’s efforts at reviving the Rancho La Puerta’s Home Owners Association, he and others of like mind had paid for the removal of an ancient, rusted-out Chevy Impala that had blocked the river’s flow to the ocean in the bird sanctuary and estuary where Greg walked mornings.

Mexican drivers behaved as if death was a concept, not a reality. Basic auto insurance was expensive, and too many hit-and-run accidents occurred where the at-fault driver fled.

It was his wife’s idea to have a second home in Mexico. Greg went along with it because it was located forty-five minutes’ drive from the U.S. border, occupied mostly by retired Americans and Canadians and seemed like a suburb of the USA. English was spoken everywhere. Local restaurants served typical American comfort food, menus were in English, prices in dollars, which saved him having to check currency exchange to be certain he wasn’t getting screwed on the rate. He missed the familiarity of his life before Mexico. He was a man who liked predictability, and Mexico had little of it.

A recent example the irregularity of his Mexico life was the nightmare that appeared overnight on the empty lot across from their home: A giant, hideous mobile home somehow snuck in before dawn. Outrage burned in him. Home Owner Rules at Rancho La Puerta didn’t permit mobile homes. From the moment he discovered this intrusion, a single thought dominated Greg’s mind: He see the monstrosity that despoiled his view removed, if it was the last thing he ever accomplished.

It had never entered Greg’s mind that their move to Mexico would be permanent. A second home is a vacation home. But their plan had to be altered as Lucy’s parents began their slide toward the end and Greg had experienced emergency bypass surgery, but now his father in caw was gone and his mother-in-law out-of-the way and he had recovered it was time to get back on an even keel, back to their normal life.

Hanging his sun hat and walking stick on the brass hook next to the door, he prepared to rescue his wife from her loudmouthed mother-in-law.

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Greg entered their custom-designed kitchen they had planned together and saw his wife’s shoulders drooped and knew his sweet-tempered wife—who’d rescued abandoned animals and found them homes and couldn’t bear to see any creature in pain and desired nothing more than for everyone she knew to be happy—her pugilistic mother had her daughter on the emotional ropes, and if Greg didn’t intervene, Lucy just might cave and her mother would be back with them, and that couldn’t happen. The old gal had lost it after the fall from their patio caused a concussion.

“Have you had your medication today, Mom?”

“Right here.” Her mother shook a pill bottle at Lucy. “I’m saving them to kill myself,” she sneered.

“Mom, please.”

Greg strode to his wife’s side and rested his hand on her shoulder and felt her ease at his touch.

“You act like your mother’s too much trouble.”

A waft of Greg’s cologne filled Lucy’s nostrils and reassured her.

“But you are trouble, Ruth, and you like it.”

He leaned forward toward the screen. “But Lucy thinks you’re serious, and it worries her.”

“Now you’re Sigmund Freud?” Her mother growled and smiled at the attention.

“How are you doing, Mom?”

“Stop calling me Mom. I’m not your mother, and I wasn’t a teenaged bride! You’re seventy-two. I’m only fifteen years older, and I don’t know what my daughter sees in an old man like you.”

“I don’t either,” Greg grinned.

“He’s good in bed,” Lucy teased.

“Thank you, babe.” Greg pressed her shoulder and straightened his six-foot frame.

“I think I’m going to vomit,” said Ruth.

“You need anything from the States?”

“Bring some quality toilet paper. Mexican stuff is like wiping my ass with sandpaper.”

“Will do,” Greg said. Turning to Lucy, he mouthed, “Coffee?”

She nodded. Greg moved toward the kitchen’s granite counter with its gleaming home brewing system.

A young, portly Mexican woman dressed in pink scrubs appeared on Lucy’s screen next to her mother.

“Señora Ruth, it’s a nice day to go to the beach,” she said in accented English.

“Hi Selina,” Lucy greeted her mother’s caretaker with a wave.

“Speak English,” her mother admonished.

“She is speaking English, Mom.”

Ruth pointed a finger at the screen as she leaned forward. The app closed.

“She hung up on me!” Lucy slammed her laptop closed. “And just after she threatened to commit suicide.”

“It was a box of Tic Tacs,” Greg said. “Patients don’t have access to meds.”

Lucy pushed her chair back and stood, smoothing her shorts. He grinned at the sight of her in shorts, her tanned, toned legs, a cute yellow top, her hair pulled back like a nineteen-fifties teen. She looked younger than her years. Her feet were bare as usual.

“What are you looking at?”

“You look like a kid.”

“Well, since I’ve come to Mexico, sometimes I feel like a kid. Life is less stressful.”

“You think?”

“You don’t?”

“Some days.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll check on my mom later.”

She looked at her clean-shaven, narrow-hipped husband. His salt-and-pepper hair creased after removing his sun hat. His ironed jeans and plaid blue Ralph Lauren shirt open at the collar.

“I like that you worry about me. It means you care.”

“What a strange thing to say. You’re my wife.”

She paused, waiting for him to add, “I love you.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Everything.

“You have a Spanish lesson today?”

“Afterwards.”

“If your mother were an animal, she would’ve been shot long ago.”

“Greg!” she snapped.

“Sorry, that was insensitive,” he apologized. “I spent boyhood summers on my grandfather’s farm. I saw a lot of stuff.”

Greg pulled Lucy into his arms. “You know I want the best for Ruth.”

Lucy leaned into her husband and had a wave of pleasure through her body. “You smell so nice.”

“I know.” He grinned.

The edge of his surgery scar from the bypass surgery peeked at her from his open shirt collar.

She pressed her hips against Greg. He gently shifted away. They’d been married nineteen years and enjoyed regular sex, until recently.

He kissed the slope of her nose and disengaged. “Coffee?”

“Yes.” She felt the warmth of his touch dissolve and wanted him back.

Lucy looked out the windows. “Another day in paradise,” she said without irony.

“Okay, so see anything interesting on your walk?”

“In my official capacity as Secretary and ombudsman for our Home Owners Association,” he said, mimicking a theatrical voice, “Rancho La Puerta is a total mess. There’s a guy who’s a renter who has chickens in a coop in his yard. He’s selling eggs. Rancho La Puerta doesn’t permit client businesses.”

Lucy thought it better not to mention the four dozen she’d bought for the local orphanage.

“Does that mean we won’t be able to get massages in Rancho La Puerta?”

“The HOA can issue a special permit.”

Lucy kept silent.

“Most important is getting that hideous trailer removed. The CC&Rs restrict homes without foundations.”

“I think it’ll blow over. The owner is a Mexican woman, a single mom with two children who want to live in Rancho La Puerta so her children can attend better schools.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that version. The other version is that she and her fiancé bought it as a rental investment. As usual in Mexico, the truth is shrouded in mystery.”

“But—” he stopped her.

“But I don’t care whether it’s true or not. Rancho La Puerta has Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions. A mobile home affects our investment, and the CC&Rs don’t permit homes without foundations.”

The coffee machine’s red light glowed. “Coffee’s ready,” Lucy pointed out to change the subject. She worried about his blood pressure even though his cardiologist had assured her, “There’s nothing to worry about.” She prepared a strict Mediterranean diet, though Greg loved steak and considered a meal with fish insubstantial.

“Stevia?” Greg asked as he lifted the carafe of fresh-brewed coffee and poured a cup for each of them.

“Already added,” she held out her cup.

He tilted the coffee pot and filled her cup as he continued.

“At some point people need to take responsibility. It’s not the nineteen eighties. Mexico has had computers for quite a few years. The government recognizes the importance of knowing who’s in their country. I mean, how many of our neighbors boast they’ve never had legal residency here?”

“I don’t see what it has to do with the trailer that has you so worked up. There have been trailers in Rancho La Puerta before we bought here. They’re not noticeable because they have foundations like regular dwellings and landscaping. I saw concrete blocks are on the lot. I’m sure that will happen here too.”

“No, it won’t. I don’t understand why you don’t understand. She’s Mexican. Even if she doesn’t live there, you know they don’t take care of property. They put out their garbage without lids and coyotes get into it and rats and dogs and cats. They don’t believe in spaying. I guess it’s against their religion, like abortion, and we can’t do anything about it because the damn Mexican government doesn’t permit it.”

“That’s not new. We have Mexican neighbors. Some are descendants of the founders of Rancho La Puerta.”

“That’s different. They’re Mexican-Americans, or Mexicans who worked and lived in the United States long enough to adapt to our way of life. A whole different breed.”

“Wow. ‘Breed?’ They’re not animals.”

“We are all animals. And I’m not alone in this. There are plenty of owners who agree—no more illegals.”

Lucy fell silent. This was as close as they came to talking politics.

Early in their relationship Lucy recognized they were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. He’d voted for George Bush and couldn’t fathom why anyone would vote for a climate change nutcase like Al Gore, whom Lucy had voted for at the last moment because she didn’t think Ralph Nader could win. Gore won the popular vote.

Greg continued. “I’m just trying to protect our investment. Do you know our house is now worth almost a half million dollars? Not pesos. And we’re cliffside, not the beach—too bad or it’d be worth a hundred grand more. But with that mobile across from us it…”

Lucy interrupted. “We’re not planning to sell. I’ve been coming here since my college days. I can ride my horse on the beach. We can have a margarita on the beach at sunset. It’s a lot more relaxed here.”

“And on Monday mornings the beach is littered with trash from campers partying all night. Laws are a good thing. Look, I’m not talking about next week. We need to have options. I’m trying to protect you. What if I die? Would you want to live here alone? I’m trying to protect us.”

Hearing his assumption that she would outlive him distressed Lucy.

Greg sipped his coffee and looked to her for a response.

“Do we need to talk about this now?”

“I’m fine,” he reassured her. “We just need a plan.”

“Why?”

“Why? Have you gone native? Are you a Mexican who doesn’t plan ahead, just deals with things when they happen? That’s how all these half-assed houses you see scattered around look like that. Builders started without plans or permission, were caught, fined, and walked away to let it rot.”

“I don’t understand why you don’t get how this situation is a threat to us. Let me explain: when we bought seven years ago for one hundred thousand, we got a deal. We remodeled and expanded at a cost of fifty grand. Now I’m getting calls and emails from realtors that if we want to sell, we can get three times that. We’ve got million-dollar views, a three-bedroom house with a garage on a full lot with a separate apartment. This is the Riviera north coast of Mexico. In Malibu or Santa Barbara, this place would go for seven, maybe ten million.”

“It’s Baja California, Mexico, not Santa Barbara, California. All this speculation isn’t planning.”

“I don’t need protection and I don’t plan to sell or leave. My mother is here. My horse is here. Our home is here. I don’t know how you can even think we’d leave considering what’s going on in the States now—government agents breaking down doors, grabbing people out of their homes like it was 1939 in Poland.”

“That’s just left-wing crapola.”

“We watch the same news.”

“It doesn’t mean I believe it. The networks have to put something on between ads for sexual aids and hair products. I watch for sports news and weather reports.”

Sometimes Lucy felt she wasn’t the one who needed protection—he was. Greg had grown up in a small town and upon graduation from college gone to work for an aerospace and defense company until he took early retirement. In a way he had been sheltered his entire life, and intelligent as he was, lacked the street savvy Lucy’s father had taught her. She feared that her husband didn’t know the true nature of the slob in the White House as she personally did.

Until she retired and moved to California and then Mexico, Lucy owned a catering business in New York City that handled executive lunches. The real estate developer who would become president had booked her company for a large luncheon that required her hiring extra staff. The event had been well received and got good press. He’d personally sought Lucy out to congratulate and shake her hand with one of his tiny ones and attempted to embrace her. She backed away thanking him for his business. He stiffed her, not in his preferred way, he just never paid for her catering service. She sent the unpaid bill for collection. It was eventually dismissed in one of his bankruptcies.

“Rancho La Puerta HOA rules are unenforceable,” Lucy calmly stated. “Unlike the States, the Mexican government doesn’t recognize private governments in its country.”

And there it was. Lucy’s familiarity with rules and how things actually operated in the world.

“You’ve done your research.”

“My Dad investigated it.” Even with Alzheimer’s, he had times when he was himself. “To make sure we knew everything necessary.”

“Well,” Greg offered weakly, “I’m certain as more buyers pay higher prices for homes—my point is, it’s not right only a few of us are paying dues.”

“You’re right, Greg. And everyone should pick up their dog’s poop too.”

“Sometimes your sense of humor is misplaced.”

“No, I’m serious. They really should pick up the poop.”

Lucy noticed the kitchen was getting brighter; the morning sun was getting higher. She needed to change into her jeans and boots if she wanted to get a ride in before she went to visit Ruth.

“They are not our kind of people. And I know, Lucy, you grew up in a melting pot and you don’t understand how certain people just bring down home values.”

Greg continued. “I understand your sympathy for the single mom version, but I can’t let Rancho La Puerta become a slum. Putting a trailer next to valuable custom homes is illogical. People who don’t think straight can’t be helped. Certain kinds of people are beyond help. I can tell by your expression you think I’m wrong, but you would be surprised at how many of our neighbors agree with me. I’m not alone. We have to protect ourselves.” He stirred his coffee with a Mikasa spoon.

“Greg, we’re Jewish.”

“I am aware of that, and that is a factor in why it’s so important to avoid the wrong kinds of neighbors.”

“That makes no sense. And I just—Greg, I’m not—what to—I mean, in my family alone, do you know my great-grandfather was murdered on a train in France?”

“You’ve mentioned it.”

“And my great-grandmother married off my grandmother at fifteen years old to an Italian man twice her age who in exchange provided papers that designated her and her remaining children as his and Catholic. They were even baptized and confirmed at the church.”

“I’m not really following the point you’re trying to make.”

“My father passed the New York State bar exam in the nineteen fifties and couldn’t get a job. You know New York, liberal New York, didn’t hire Jews.”

“And wasn’t that lucky for you, Lucy. In a law firm he would have been buried under paperwork in a backroom where clients never saw him. Instead, he became rich. We all have to adapt to our circumstances.”

Lucy’s mind blocked his words like a boxer shielding himself from blows. Please stop, she thought, please stop before it’s too late, because she knew there was a point from which there was no return and Greg was too close to it. “Let’s just leave this for now.”

“Sure. I just want you to know I understand that we come from very different environments. Your background bothered me at first. I mean, your foul-mouthed mother was a lot to take, but fortunately she’s out of the picture now.”

“She’s very much in my picture. She’s, my mother.”

“Sometimes our differences loom large. I guess you can’t help it because you were exposed to all kinds of people in New York’s melting pot: Italian—back then, we called them ‘guineas,’ ‘wops,’ but now that’s not PC. Irish were ‘Micks,’ Puerto Ricans ‘Spics,’ Blacks—well, we all know what they were. I grew up in a picturesque mountain town of, at most, three thousand people who all knew each other, one way or another. My family was the only Jewish residents at that time. Neighbors were polite because my father owned the town pharmacy. I survived because I’m over six feet tall with Nordic good looks, thanks to my Swedish ancestors, and I was a pretty decent basketball player. Other than the fact that no girls would be seen in public with me, I was popular.”

“Well—”

A loud crash interrupted her. She turned and saw a bird had crashed into the kitchen window and was sliding unconscious down the glass.

Lucy’s cup fell out of her hand and shattered on the terrazzo floor.

“Careful,” Greg warned. “You’re barefoot.”

She spun and hurried to the kitchen door, flinging it open and running out.

Sun-warmed dirt crunched under Lucy’s feet as she hurried to find where the bird fell, hoping all the while it had recovered and flown away. But the small yellow-breasted bird lay still on the ground beneath the window. A helpless grief engulfed her as she leaned over to pick up the bird and gently cup it in the palm of her hand.

“Please don’t die,” she whispered, pressing her thumb rhythmically on its chest to restart its heart.

She could not go back inside the house, not while he was still there. Her thoughts raced for a solution. Lucy began walking toward the apartment extension she’d built for her parents. Her garden Crocs were right where she’d left them on the patio. She put her feet in them before turning to press in the lock code. The door opened.

She stepped inside into the familiar environment her parents had decorated with many of their belongings that Lucy had grown up with in their Yonkers home.

She opened a window, placed the bird in a glass candy dish on the windowsill to allow the sun to warm its body.

The apartment felt comfortable and inviting to her. Ruth’s crochet needles lay entwined on a half-complete napkin on a side table next to the sofa. The large recliner her father sat in faced the valley views. Why hadn’t her mother taken the crochet with her? Did she know she would return? On the bookshelves were pictures of her parents and Lucy with her first horse. The bedroom held two single beds because her father insisted—he didn’t want his wife to wake up one morning and find her husband dead next to her. The apartment was a perfect interim step for as she worked out her next step. Greg would be safe if he stayed on his side of the locked door away from Ruth.

Lucy walked to the connecting door between the apartment and the main house and pushed the bolt to lock it. She sat on the couch, reached for the landline phone, and dialed Dr. Gutierrez’s private number to tell her she would be taking her mother home that afternoon.

© Carol Roper Copyright February 2026

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