“Margaret and I have known each other since we were girls. We haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years, and there’s so much to talk about.”
I offered to drive her, but she insisted on taking the train from Cleveland. She reminded me that being eighty didn’t mean she needed someone supervising every decision she made.
On Monday morning, I dropped her at the station with a small blue suitcase decorated with a pink ribbon. She wore her navy coat over an unusually oversized gray cardigan, but I assumed she’d simply chosen something comfortable for traveling.
For the first three evenings, she called as promised, although each conversation was shorter than the previous one. She sounded exhausted and offered little information beyond saying that she and Margaret were enjoying their reunion.
On the fourth evening, she stopped answering my calls and eventually sent a brief text explaining that her phone had died. Similar messages arrived over the following days, which worried me because Mom had always disliked texting.
