It was my father. New number, new phone, because Rosalind had access to the old one. The message said: She doesn’t know I’m telling you. Don’t let her sell it. I’m sorry.
He had not signed the deed over to her. He could not. He had signed a listing agreement, which she presented to him as a maintenance contract, and which he did not read because he has early Lewy body dementia and was diagnosed in March and nobody told me. Rosalind had a broker walking the property in September. She banned me because she needed eight weeks of quiet.
The listing died the moment Perpetua sent the trust documents. My father never owned the house. He had never owned it since 2011.
I drove out the following weekend with a locksmith. The rocking chair was gone. So were my grandmother’s glass floats, the wall of photographs, and the kitchen table my grandfather built. Rosalind had emptied it in October and sold most of it at an estate auction in Halloway for a little over nine thousand dollars.
I got some of it back. The table, two of the floats, the framed photograph of my mother at nineteen on that porch. The rest is in strangers’ houses now and always will be.
I did not sue her. Perpetua advised it and I said no, because the only asset worth taking was my father’s care, and I was not going to strip a man’s home out from under him to win a point against his wife. Rosalind knew that. She has always been good at knowing exactly what a person will not do.
They still live together. She still calls me jealous, at holidays, in front of relatives who have stopped correcting her.
My father comes to the beach house twice a year. He does not always know where he is. Last June he sat on the porch for two hours and told me the water looked like his wedding day, and he was not talking about Rosalind.
I go every month now. The chair I bought is not the right chair and never will be.
