Special People
I paid my son’s rent for three years, and when his new wife smiled and told me I wasn’t special enough to be at their wedding, I smiled back. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d already started adding things up, and that the sum was going to surprise us both. You have to understand what those three years looked like from the inside, because from the outside I imagine they looked like a generous mother helping her son get started.
That’s what I told myself too, for a long time. It was the story that made the monthly transfers feel like love rather than what they actually were, which was the gradual hollowing out of everything my late husband Klaus had worked to leave me. Klaus died four years ago, quietly, the way he’d lived, a cardiac event on a Tuesday morning while I was at the market buying the good coffee he liked.
He left me the house on Birkenweg, a modest savings account, and the inheritance from his own parents that we’d never spent because we were the kind of people who believed in keeping something back for hard times. I was sixty-three years old, recently widowed, and for the first time in my adult life I was making every financial decision alone. Max is my only child.
He was thirty-one when Klaus died, living in a rented apartment across the city with a rotating cast of roommates and a career in sound engineering that paid inconsistently and required, he explained, a certain period of establishment before it became stable. I understood this. I had watched him grow up.
I knew he was not lazy, exactly, but that he had a talent for finding reasons why the present moment was not quite the right moment to handle things himself. When he met Lena, I was glad for him. She was sharp and pretty and seemed to organize him in ways I’d given up trying to do.
She had opinions about everything, which I initially mistook for intelligence, and a way of stating those opinions that made them sound like facts that everyone else had simply been slow to recognize. The first time she came to dinner at my house, she rearranged my kitchen cabinet while I was in the bathroom, explaining afterward that the flow made more practical sense the new way. I laughed it off.
I should have made note of it. The rent arrangement began as a temporary measure. Max and Lena were moving in together, the apartment they wanted was five hundred euros per month, and Max’s work had been slow.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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