Cullen's reply came before I had finished driving home.
My phone vibrated on the passenger seat.
I didn't touch it while I was driving.
When I reached my house, I sat in the parked car and opened the messages.
There were several.
The first was about the locks.
The second was about the boxes.
The third was about what he had already told people.
"We've been telling everyone we're moving into the beach house."
I read it again.
Then another message appeared.
"Mom, this is embarrassing. We already made plans."
I put the phone down on my lap.
He was embarrassed.
Not sorry.
Not confused.
Embarrassed.
I thought about the wedding he had just described.
Forty-six people had apparently been important enough to invite.
His mother had not been.
Yet he expected me to worry about the impression his friends would have when they discovered he couldn't enter my house.
I didn't answer immediately.
A message from Blythe appeared next.
It was longer than Cullen's.
She said they had already given up their apartment.
She described the trouble they would have finding somewhere else to live.
She said the timing was terrible.
Her words were emotional, and I could imagine her sitting somewhere with her phone in both hands, waiting for me to change my mind.
I understood that losing an apartment could be frightening.
I also understood that moving into a house without the owner's permission was not a reasonable solution.
I had not told them to give up their apartment.
I had not promised them the beach house.
I typed a reply.
I wished them a pleasant honeymoon and told them I hoped they would work out their arrangements.
Then I put the phone away.
I didn't feel proud of myself.
Part of me wanted to drive back to the coast and let them in.
I wanted to return to the familiar arrangement in which Cullen made a decision and I found a way to make it work.
That was the habit I had to resist.
Love had made it easy to confuse helping my son with protecting him from the consequences of his choices.
I was tired of doing that.
A few days later, the wedding photographs appeared online.
I was alone when I saw them.
I had been sitting in my living room, sorting through the mail, when I opened the page where Blythe had posted the pictures.
There were so many of them.
The flowers were expensive.
The tables were carefully arranged.
The guests wore formal clothes, and almost everyone seemed to know where to stand for the photographs.
Cullen looked happy.
That was the first thing I noticed.
He stood beside Blythe in his wedding suit, smiling broadly.
She looked beautiful in her dress.
For a few seconds, I let myself look at them as a mother might look at any wedding photograph.
My son had married.
He had begun a new chapter of his life.
I should have been happy for him.
And some part of me was.
But the happiness was mixed with something I could not put aside.
I kept looking at the faces around them.
I wondered which guests knew I existed.
I wondered which ones had asked about me.
Then I found the wedding cake.
It had three tiers.
White icing covered the sides, with decorations arranged carefully around the edges.
At the very top sat a small model of a house.
I leaned closer to the screen.
At first, I thought it was just an ordinary decoration.
Then I recognized the roof.
Gray shingles.
The broad porch.
The blue front door.
My beach house.
Someone had made a miniature version of the property where Nile and I had spent six summers repairing storm damage.
The model even resembled the front of the house closely enough that I could recognize the shape of the porch railing.
I sat very still.
My son had excluded me from his wedding because I supposedly did not fit the company he wanted to keep.
Yet the house I owned had been placed on the cake as part of the celebration.
They had included the property.
They had included the dream of living there.
They had included the future they had apparently planned for themselves.
They had not included me.
I scrolled down.
There were comments from friends and relatives.
People congratulated the couple.
Others complimented the venue and the cake.
Then I noticed one comment that made me stop.
Someone had written that they were sorry I had been unable to attend and hoped I was feeling better.
I read it twice.
Feeling better?
I had not been sick.
I had not been hospitalized.
I had not spent the week recovering from anything.
I had simply not been invited.
I began reading the comments more carefully.
The message made it clear that at least one guest believed my absence had been caused by illness.
That meant someone had offered an explanation.
And that explanation had not come from me.
I couldn't tell how many people had been given the same story.
I couldn't know whether everyone at the wedding believed it.
But I knew that I had never told anyone I was too unwell to attend.
Cullen had not simply failed to invite me.
Someone had allowed people to believe I was absent because I couldn't be there.
I closed the page.
Then I opened it again.
I looked at the cake.
The tiny blue door seemed to stare back at me.
Nile had painted the real door with his own hands.
He had spent an afternoon working on it while I held the ladder steady.
He had stepped back several times, squinting at the color, until he was satisfied.
I remembered how proud he had been.
The wedding cake had turned that memory into a decoration for a celebration I had not been allowed to attend.
I felt foolish for caring so much about a photograph.
It was only icing.
It was only a cake.
But it represented something real.
Cullen and Blythe had built their plans around a house that belonged to me, and they had begun treating those plans as if they were already settled.
The comment about my health made the exclusion worse.
It meant people had been given a story about me that I had never told.
I wanted to call Cullen.
I wanted to ask him exactly what he had said to the guests.
Instead, I turned off my phone and went to make tea.
I stood at the kitchen counter while the water heated.
I took down two cups without thinking.
Then I remembered that I was alone and returned one to the cupboard.
That small mistake upset me more than I expected.
Nile had been gone for fourteen years.
I had learned to live with the empty chair, the quiet evenings, and the ordinary tasks that no longer needed to be shared.
But I had never stopped expecting my family to treat our memories with care.
That evening, I went through the photographs one last time.
I didn't comment on them.
I didn't contact Blythe.
I didn't ask Cullen to explain himself.
I simply looked at the little house on the cake and accepted what it was telling me.
They had made room for my property in their future.
They had made no room for me.
Click here to continue reading: PART 4: Her Mother Called to Warn Me About Embarrassment, Then Her Father Asked About a Document I Had Never Signed
The Sunday Morning Call That Made Me Question Everything I Thought I Knew About My Only Son
Part 3 of 24
