Part 2 — What Gabriel Found at Dinner
I moved my mother back to the guest room before Gabriel came downstairs.
I changed the sheets. I replaced the nightstand. I organized her medications. I filled a glass of water from the kitchen and set it within reach. I helped her out of the basement slowly, one step at a time, because the stairs were steep and her body was working against itself in the way that chemotherapy forces a body to work against itself, fighting the disease by fighting everything else along the way.
Mom did not complain. She did not describe what the four days in the basement had been like. She simply held my arm and climbed the stairs and lay down in the bed that should have been hers the entire time and closed her eyes.
I asked her if Gabriel had given her meals.
She told me he brought food twice a day. She told me it was left on the top step of the basement stairs because he told her he did not want to go down there.
He did not want to go down there.
He had put her there. And then he did not want to visit the place he had put her.
I tucked the blanket around her shoulders. I told her she was not going back to the basement. I told her the room was hers for as long as she needed it.
She looked at me with the exhausted, grateful eyes of a woman who had spent seventy years refusing to be a burden and had just spent four days being treated as one by a man who measured his authority in square footage.
She told me she was sorry for causing trouble.
I told her she had not caused a single thing.
At 6:15, Gabriel came downstairs for dinner. He sat at the kitchen table the way he always sat, with the particular ease of a man who believed the chair belonged to him more than it belonged to anyone else in the room.
I set an envelope on the table beside his plate.
He looked at it. He looked at me.
I told him to open it.
Inside were three documents Patricia had prepared and sent electronically while I was moving my mother back to the guest room.
The first was a copy of the property deed, highlighting the sole owner. My name. Not his.
