It was hurting me.
The words were the least of it, eventually.
Agnes began rearranging furniture.
Not asking. Not suggesting. Rearranging. I would step out of the room to refill drinks and come back to find her dragging the armchair across the carpet with the focused determination of someone correcting an obvious error.
“What are you doing?” I asked the first time.
“It looks better near the window.”
“I put it where it is for a reason.”
She gave me the patient smile. The one that communicated that my reasons were sweet but not quite
right.
“Well, in my son’s home, this arrangement makes more sense.”
One afternoon I walked into the living room and found that the photographs on the mantel had been replaced. Our family photos, Hope and Oliver at various ages, Jason and me at a friend’s wedding, a
picture I loved of all four of us at the beach two summers ago, had been moved to a drawer. In their place were framed photos of Jason as a child. His school picture from fifth grade. A photo of him at what
looked like a family reunion I had never attended.
Agnes looked up from the sofa with an expression of benign satisfaction.
“I thought these would mean more to him,” she explained.
“Those are pictures of his wife and children,” I said.
“Of course. I just thought these might be a nice addition.”
She had not added them. She had replaced them. The distinction seemed not to register.
She criticized the decorating in the way that certain people criticize, framing every preference of mine as a mistake and every preference of hers as simply obvious good sense. The cushions were too bright. The
dining table was too small for proper entertaining. The kitchen really should have darker cabinets. The hallway mirror was, she announced one afternoon while standing in front of it, an unfortunate choice.
“Jason always preferred more traditional things,” she said once, standing in the middle of the living room and turning slowly, cataloguing.
Jason looked up from the floor where he was building a block tower with Oliver. “No, I didn’t.”
“You did before Gracie started choosing everything.”
“I chose the sofa,” I said.
“Did you?” Agnes replied, with the tone of someone offering the charitable interpretation.
She began inviting people over without telling me.
The doorbell would ring on a Sunday afternoon and I would open the door to find Jason’s cousins on the porch with a dish of something, or his aunt and uncle, or a family friend I had met once at Christmas three years ago.
“Agnes said we were all gathering here,” they would say.
When I asked Agnes about it, she looked at me with what seemed like genuine confusion.
“They’re family. Why would they need an invitation?”
“Because this is our house,” I said.
