My brother took my mother to the countryside for August – “let her have a break from the apartment building.” On Thursday, my mother called from a neighbor’s phone: she had run out of blood pressure medication, and “Wojtek couldn’t be bothered because he was angry.” I dropped the medication off on Friday. My mother was waiting at the gate with a bag.

Or someone told her that two would be enough.

 

I left Łódź at 6 a.m. on Friday. I drove through Piotrków, then along side roads through villages whose names I remembered from childhood—because Wojtek had bought a house in an area where our parents had friends. This wasn’t his family’s village. This was a house Wojtek had bought eight years ago with the money from the sale of his father’s plot of land.

 

We never discussed this plot of land directly. My father left it to Wojtek, even though my husband and I had contributed to its maintenance for years. When my father died, Wojtek sold the plot within three months and bought a house in the countryside. He didn’t ask my mother if she wanted to live there. He didn’t ask me if I had any objections.

 

I arrived before nine. The house stood at the end of a gravel road, behind a wooden fence that Wojtek had painted green. From a distance, it looked pretty—a cottage with a garden, hollyhocks by the window, an apple tree.