“Did you move the sofa by yourself, Mom?” he asked. He was looking down at the pale, rectangular indentations in the wool carpet where the heavy legs had sat for three decades.
“I wanted to clean behind it,” I said. I kept my hands steady by holding my mug of hot tea with both palms, the ceramic warm against my skin. “Dust collects back there when the heat kicks on.”
“At three in the morning?” Daniel looked at me, his brow furrowing as he set the box of bags on the bottom stair. “Melissa said she heard something heavy sliding around down here while we were asleep. She thought we had an intruder.”
“I could not sleep,” I said, using the quiet, precise voice I had used for thirty years on the night shift at the hospital. “So I cleaned.”
“You shouldn’t be lifting heavy oak by yourself,” Daniel said, his voice dropping into that quick, apologetic tone he used when he was trying to smooth things over between the women in his life. “We just want to make sure you are completely safe here, Mom.”
The words sat between us in the cold morning light. I touched my wedding ring, spinning the band once around my knuckle, feeling the thin notch where the gold had worn down over the years.
