Chapter 2

I gave a bitter little laugh.

All I did was hand back to them the very words they'd used on me, and just like that I was the one being unreasonable, impossible, always fighting over things?

Before I could say anything more, Alison clicked her tongue.

"It's not that I favor my parents."

"But you know it yourself. Your pension runs a few thousand a month. Even living alone you'd be comfortable. My parents don't have any retirement insurance. If they had to live on their own, think how miserable that would be."

"And don't say this has nothing to do with you. If you'd taken my hint back then and made the lump-sum back payment for them, they wouldn't be stuck with two hundred a month. Would I be doing any of this otherwise?"

"Besides, you've seen the floor plan. It's not that I won't let you stay. There's just nowhere to put you."

I looked at Alison's floor plan again.

Six rooms.

Even the future dog had a room set aside, and I didn't, which meant that in their eyes I ranked below a dog they didn't even own yet.

Alison saw me staring at the pet room and said, a little impatiently,

"I can't just cut off my own parents because I married into your family, can I?"

"Honestly, it's not like I absolutely refuse to let you stay."

"Tell you what. You work a little harder and upgrade to a house, or buy my parents another place, and then we'll let you move in."

"I really can't just abandon my parents!"

I rolled my eyes and told her, in my head, to keep dreaming.

Before I could turn it down, Jordan and Margot suddenly started dabbing at their eyes.

"How about your father and I share one room. I don't sleep well anyway, I'm used to it. A few less hours won't kill me, not in the short run."

"After all, she's the one who paid for this place. We're living under someone else's roof. We ought to know where we stand."

"Please, don't be angry. When you're angry, Alison gets caught in the middle, and when Alison's caught in the middle, it breaks my heart."

Three:

The truth is, I don't blame Alison at all, and I don't hold Jordan and Margot's behavior against them either.

The three of them are a family. She's a good daughter who knows to look after her own parents and give them a comfortable old age, and they're parents who want to be with their daughter and have three generations under one roof.

Whatever they did, you couldn't really fault them for it. What I cared about was Sid's attitude.

"Sid, Alison knows how to take care of her parents. She's set aside two suites for them. And you?"

"Have you spared a single thought for your mother?"

Sid looked awkward. Of course he hadn't.

Ever since he married Alison, from the moment the two of them coaxed me into selling my house, he'd stopped thinking of me as his mother at all. But with the question put to him that plainly, he still didn't know how to answer.

"Alison, we're planning to have a baby anyway. How about we skip the pet and give the pet room to my mom?"

"That way we can save her pension too, put it toward the household."

Alison's brow furrowed.

Jordan and Margot only cried harder.

"There's no need to trouble yourselves!"

"We've decided. We won't stay here."

"We're country folk, we're not used to a nice place like this anyway. Let your mother have our suite."

"We'll go back to the village, or sleep in the carport downstairs, or under the overpass beside the building. We can take hardship. Anywhere's the same to us!"

"Besides, this is just our lot in life."

Listening to them, Alison's eyes welled up, aching for them.

"Sid, how did I never notice you were such a mama's boy?"

"You said you'd give me anything I wanted, and now you can't even make room for my parents."

"Since your mother's all you have room for in your heart, let's get divorced!"

"You can spend the rest of your days looking after your mother!"