Four lines.
***Ines — she’ll want to know why I didn’t tell her. Tell her I did tell her, once, in the March of last year, and she said don’t, and she was entitled to say it. She was in the middle of something.***
***A person is allowed to be in the middle of something. That is what the rest of us are for.***
***H.H.***
She wrote that twenty-one months before she died, to be read by me at some unknown point in the future, and what she chose to use it for was to let me off.
She knew exactly what I would do to myself when I found out. She knew me better after eighty-four years of her own life than my husband did after nine of mine.
The hospital band is in a box on the shelf in the front room of her house, with that note folded next to it.
***BABY GIRL HALLIDAY.***
She never met her. She died fourteen months before that band was printed.
But she is the reason it says that name and not the other one. She is the reason there was anything left to put in a trust. And she is the reason a woman in a hospital bed with a phone against her ear had an answer ready when a man asked her what she had to be proud of.
