My pregnant daughter-in-law told my son she needed “peace and quiet” and that I had to move out of the four-bedroom house my late husband and I had paid off years ago.

thermostat was next.

I liked my house at seventy-two degrees.

Harper, however, claimed pregnancy made her unbearably hot.

I had asked her several times to use a fan upstairs.

“The doctor says I need to stay cool,” she told me.

One afternoon I came home and the house felt like a refrigerator.

The thermostat read sixty-four.

My electric bill had been nearly three hundred dollars the previous month.

I stood there briefly looking at that number.

Then I took my purse and drove back to the hardware store.

I bought