Chapter 4

I stayed with Beryl at the hospital all afternoon. Toward evening I told her I was going back to the old house to pack a few clothes.

She didn't want me to go alone, but I waved her off. "Your mother knows what she's doing."

Behind the old house ran a narrow alley, a gap squeezed between two courtyard walls, just wide enough for one person to stand sideways.

I didn't go inside. I stood in the back alley, and Winston's voice leaked out through a crack in the window.

"A million dollars! A whole million! The old hag's for sure going to sign it over to Beryl!"

"So what do we do, Winston?"

"We've got to get her under control before the housing authority opens tomorrow. As long as we can prove she's crazy, that money splits three ways between us brothers, and nobody else!"

Albert volunteered. "I know a guy. He's got the psych kind of pills. Crush some into water, pour it down her throat, and she'll be like a vegetable, sign anything you want."

Jayden said, "Better to just tie her up with rope, stuff her in the pigsty, starve her a couple days. She'll sign whether she wants to or not."

Winston slapped the table. "Both work! We do it two ways. Get the pills, keep the rope ready, and move tomorrow night when nobody's around."

I clenched my fists.

Exactly the same path as my last life.

The rope. The pigsty. The drugged water.

Sixty years I raised them, and this was what it came to.

Nothing happened all through the next day. I knew they were waiting for dark.

By evening the weather turned. Black clouds pressed down, and the wind sent the tin basin in the yard banging and clattering.

"I'm going over to the old house to check the doors and windows are shut."

"Mom, let me come with you."

"No. You stay with your husband."

I walked into the old house alone.

I didn't turn on a light. I felt my way through the dark and sat down in the high-backed chair dead center in the front room.

The wind kept rising. Raindrops hammered the roof tiles like a drum.

I sat in the dark, listening to my own heartbeat, one beat and then the next.

The night I lay dying in the pigsty last life, it had been a rainy night just like this.

Bang. The door was kicked open.

Winston had a stack of papers and a box of red ink paste in his hands.

Jayden had a nylon rope coiled around his fist.

Albert carried a cup of water that gave off a sharp chemical stink.

Winston walked up to me.

"Mom, your head's been foggy lately. Your sons are taking you to a nursing home to live easy."

"Be good, press your thumbprint, drink this calming water down, and it's easier for everyone."

I didn't move. I didn't say a word.

Jayden lunged in and threw the rope straight over me.

Albert grabbed my chin and pushed the cup up to my mouth.

They had me pinned hard to the chair, nowhere left to go.

The rope pulled tighter and tighter, and I suddenly laughed.

The three of them froze, thinking my mind really had gone.

"You really think I came here to die alone tonight?"