attila

Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage. The garage was not for cars; it had been converted by the house’s previous owners into what the broker called a “mother-in-law apartment.”

- NELL FREUDENBERGER

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.