That evening, I was standing at the stove when my daughter-in-law called.
Her voice was clipped and hurried, the kind of voice people use when they have already decided that your feelings are an inconvenience.
“You don’t need to bother coming to the lake house this summer,” she said.
There was no explanation. No question. No softened edge to the sentence. She simply wrote me out of the very house I had built with my own hands, as if she were removing my name from a guest list at some neighborhood barbecue.
