Sometimes, it is the last witness to who you were.
Two weeks ago, Mom’s daily calls stopped.
That was the first wrong thing.
My mother called every evening, whether she had news or not. She would tell me about tomatoes, church gossip, the neighbor’s dog, the weather, and how I needed to stop skipping breakfast because “a grown man can’t run on gas-station coffee.”
Then silence.
My sister, Veronica, kept texting instead:
Mom’s resting.
Mom’s hip hurts.
Mom’s staying at my place in Savannah.
Signal is bad in the guest room.
Don’t worry so much, Marc.
But the family group chat went dead. No sweet, rambling messages from Mom. No heart emojis. No blurry pictures of flowers.
Just Veronica posting photos of brand-new designer furniture and her husband Chad grinning beside a sixty-thousand-dollar pickup truck.
They had been broke a month earlier.
That truck did not come from nowhere.
