I waited for my son to stand.
He didn’t.
“Susan, that’s enough,” Michael finally said.
But his voice wasn’t angry.
He sounded embarrassed.
And somehow that hurt more.
I had raised Michael after his father died.
I had sat beside hospital beds with him.
Helped him through college applications.
Loaned him my car when his broke down.
Stayed awake until two in the morning when his first serious girlfriend left him.
I had never asked him to choose me over anyone.
That night, I only wanted him to make it clear that humiliating his mother for entertainment was unacceptable.
Instead, he looked down.
I put my napkin on the table.
“Excuse me.”
Susan lowered the microphone.
“Oh, Janice, come on. It was a joke.”
I looked at her.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
Then I walked out.
The laughter followed me across the marble lobby.
Outside, the September air hit my face.
My hands began shaking.
I dropped my keys beside my Honda and had to crouch beneath the driver’s door to find them.
Once inside, I didn’t start the engine.
I just sat there.
Through the windshield, I could see the ballroom glowing beyond the hedges.
Music started again.
People were celebrating.
My son had just gotten married.
And I was alone in a parking lot, wondering when exactly being careful with money had become something shameful.
Susan believed she knew me.
She believed I was a sixty-two-year-old widow who had spent thirty-eight years teaching school and had little to show for it.
She knew about my two-bedroom apartment.
My secondhand dining table.
My nine-year-old Honda.
My habit of using coupons even when I didn’t have to.
She knew I worked part-time after retirement because I missed the classroom.
What she didn’t know was that for the previous six months, **I could have written her $80,000 check without changing my life at all.**
Six months earlier, my Aunt Eleanor had died at ninety-one.
Eleanor had always been different.
She became a traveling nurse when respectable women from her hometown were expected to marry young and stay put.
