I could not speak.
I got up and went around that table, and I took the old woman’s hands, in both of mine, and said the only thing I had.
“Saturdays,” I said. “Starting this Saturday.”
It was not the right answer. It was not generous enough, I knew even as I said it. But Waverly shut her eyes and nodded, and said, “Saturdays,” like a woman repeating a word in a language she has just begun to speak, and I think it was exactly the size of thing that both of us were able to hold.
We had the first Saturday in my kitchen.
I cleaned for two days, which is a thing I do when I am frightened, and Waverly arrived with the shortbread and a photograph album that she had taken down from the top of her wardrobe for the first time in seven years.
It was a fat blue album with a cracked spine.
She opened it on my table and turned it round, and said, in a very careful voice, “I thought perhaps you’d want to know who they were.”
I did.
I had known only a clipping. I had known the faces, but not the people. And there, on the first page, was a girl of nineteen with a wide, serious, slightly crooked smile, in a nurse’s tunic, pinning a name tag.
