Martha assumed it was called that because mothers were more likely to move in with daughters, and men were more likely to own houses. She wasn’t married, though, and her sister, Molly, who was, didn’t have a motherin-law apartment in her garage in Los Angeles, where real estate was much more expensive than it was in Baltimore. Also, Molly was busy with her children and hadn’t spoken to their mother in more than a year.
“Let’s take a break,” Martha told her mother.
“You rest here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have to clean out the fridge.”
In the past, that kind of excuse would never have fooled her mother. Judy had been an expert liar and always recognized her daughters’ amateur attempts for what they were. She would have watched from the window and seen that, instead of crossing to the house, Martha had sat down on the garage step and started looking at her phone. Someone Martha knew had read forty biographies and taken a picture of the stack; someone else had hiked to a hot spring in Iceland.
The house was small, but it included this unusual converted garage. The broker had made much of the potential for extra income, and for a while Martha had rented it to a Croatian couple who were grad students in design. The design students were extremely neat and almost never home, and once left a surprisingly delicious loaf of gluten-free zucchini bread in her mailbox. It had been hard to ask them to leave, when she and Molly had decided that their mother would move in with her.
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.
THE CHIT-CHATBOT
Is talking with a machine a conversation?