No Next of Kin

As so many folks had predicted, Miss Vera outlived them all.

She'd married at sixteen, was widowed, alone, and raising two sons by twenty. Seeing the remainder of her life as a long and painful struggle, she left the boys with a close friend and took an early morning ferry to the mainland, in search of a future less dark. Three marriages and three life insurance policies later she returned, financially secure for life and ready to resume motherhood. Despite the fact that her parents had died during her absence, that she was nearly forty and her boys grown men who barely remembered her, it seemed not to have occurred to her that she wouldn't be welcomed back with open arms. Where she had seen providing for her family, the village had seen child abandonment. Where she had seen personal sacrifice, the village had seen neglect and selfishness. Her sons were polite, as they had been raised to be, but they felt no connection to the woman who suddenly appeared on their doorstep and the reunion was shortlived and tense. All Vera's attempts to explain were received with a coldness she found shocking and soon after coming home, she found herself alone again, living in a rented cabin designed for summer use - her house had been long since sold for taxes and neither of her boys offered her lodging.

Convinced that the islanders would come around in time, Miss Vera decided to wait them out. She bought the old Titus place around the cove and moved in over one autumn weekend - when she found that none of the locals were willing to work for her, she hired mainland laborers who came and went all winter long. I want it done by spring! she had told them in no uncertain terms, My boys will be coming home then and I expect everything to be perfect! In public, the islanders watched impassively and from a distance but in private they chattered like monkeys about the waste of time and money and mindset. Kinder voices used words like misguided and tragic while the harsher ones prefered to say that Vera was reaping what she had sown and that it would it be a failed crop.

The renovations were completed by mid May, just as the weather turned warm and the summer people began arriving - the house had been transformed from a dilapidated and neglected old wreck to a showplace - it shone with fresh paint and new shingles, window boxes of ivy hung from the upper story and the newly enclosed glassed in porch gleamed. Miss Vera's meticulously cared for old Mercedes sat ready and waiting on the just laid circular gravel drive and the roses were beginning to bloom. Vera herself, spent her days in her curved rocking chair, watching the dusty road and reading while she waited for company that never came. She was sitting just so when news of the accident came - both her boys had perished in a late night car wreck on the mainland. James and Lilly, her first and only visitors since her return, came to tell her and make arrangements. Vera thanked the pastor for his kindness in coming in person and gave Lilly a kiss on the cheek before resuming her place in the rocking chair, her book clutched in her shaking hands, her dry eyes staring across the cove at the outgoing tide.

The double service was held four days later with most of the island present and Miss Vera noticeably absent. It was said that she was still in her rocking chair, still watching the tide, grieving in her own way and surrounded by empty rooms. When she died some forty years later, she willed the house and all the contents to the island's historical society.

She outlived them all and had no next of kin.