The first birthday I spent without him, Laura sent a text.
“Happy birthday, Mom. Love you.”
That was it.
No voice.
No visit.
No knock at the door.
I made excuses for them for years.
They were busy.
They had jobs.
They had children.
Maybe the house hurt them because it still carried Richard everywhere.
His jacket in the hall closet.
His tackle box in the garage.
His handwriting on recipe cards and file labels.
But after a while, excuses weigh more than loneliness.
One year, I drove almost two hours to bring Michael the chocolate cake I had baked for every birthday since he was six.
When I pulled into his driveway, balloons were tied to the mailbox.
Cars lined the curb.
Music drifted from inside the house.
He opened the door, saw me holding the cake, and his entire face changed.
“Mom,” he said, lowering his voice. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“It’s your birthday, sweetheart.”
He glanced behind him.
There were people laughing in his kitchen.
I could smell barbecue sauce and beer through the open door.
“It’s just a thing with Anna’s family,” he said. “This really isn’t a good time.”
He left me standing on his porch with the cake in my hands.
I cried so hard on the drive home that I had to pull into a gas station and sit there until the road stopped blurring.
I learned about my granddaughter Emily’s graduation from Facebook.
There she was in her cap and gown, smiling between Laura and her husband.
Nobody had told me the date.
Nobody had saved me a seat.
I mailed Emily five hundred dollars and a handwritten letter telling her how proud her grandfather would have been.
She texted back, “Thanks, Grandma.”
Nothing else.
When I slipped in the garage and fractured my wrist, Laura said she would come after work.
She never did.
When doctors found a lump in my breast and I spent four days waiting for scan results with terror lodged in my throat, I told no one.
Not because I was brave.
