“Hi, Mom,” I say through the echoey Bluetooth in my car.

“Hi, honey. How are you? We’re thinking of painting your room. What do you think about a nice shade of lilac?” She cuts right to it.

It doesn’t matter what I think of a nice shade of lilac. My parents still live in the Brooklyn apartment I grew up in, and every time I go back to visit, nothing about the place has changed. My room still has the same twin mattress I slept on as a teenager, the hot-pink-corded landline, and faded boy band posters taped over the closet door. Despite acting like they intend to modernize it—or even just repaint it—I know that what they’re really hoping is that one day I will find myself living with them again and they can pride themselves on having not touched a thing in my old bedroom. As if they are preserving an exhibit for the Smithsonian. I don’t know how to break it to them, but if I didn’t move home, if I didn’t come crying to Mommy and Daddy after my husband died, then why would I now? I’m already over the hard part. Aren’t I?

“Lilac sounds great,” I say.

“I’m not sure. That room doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. Could end up being very dark. Anyhow, what’s new with you? How’s your love life?” Unlike the boy band posters in my room, Jean’s “mom antics” and thick New York accent have not faded one bit.

“Nothing new, really,” I say with a hard swallow. “Sorry I missed your call yesterday.”

“That’s quite alright. Were ya on another date?”

I love the way my mom says “ya” instead of “you” when she wants to sprinkle a little extra sugar on things.

“No, I was just sleeping, actually. Things have been...kind of crazy around here,” I say, merging into the middle lane as if that’s the one that’ll allow me to go faster than seven miles per hour.

“You’re not overexerting yourself, I hope?”

Since Decker died, my mom has never stopped oscillating between what if and who’s next. Telling her things are crazy concerns her, and I get it. She wants to make sure I’m not raising my blood pressure or doing anything that might cause me to have a stroke out of nowhere. That outcome sounds extreme and she sounds overbearing, both of which actually describe my mother perfectly, but once you watch your daughter lose her otherwise-healthy husband that way, the instinct kicks in and doesn’t really go away. At least it hasn’t for Jean. So I cut her some slack and insist that I’m fine.

“Everything’s good. I’ve just been putting in some longer hours at work recently. It’s kind of like how it is in New York, except us LA peeps can’t all jet off to the Hamptons on the weekends, you know?”

“Oh, bless it,” she mutters, one of her famous Jean Rosen sayings.

In hindsight, blaming my exhaustion on “LA things” was probably not the right move. I don’t want her to be sad. She didn’t take it well when I decided to move to Los Angeles three weeks after graduating from NYU, and she still hasn’t fully accepted that I moved to a place that doesn’t sell pizza by the slice on every street corner. I know I’m not the first native New Yorker to up and move three thousand miles away from celebrated carbs and public transportation for some bullshit “job in entertainment” on the West Coast, but I could bet Jean Rosen took it the hardest.