I didn’t remember writing it. I must have written it that first night in the hospital, while she was asleep after surgery. Left it on her tray table. And she kept it. For four years.
I put the napkin down on the table. I couldn’t see it anymore. My eyes were too full.
“Why?” I said. “Why did you keep all of this?”
Mrs. Whitaker took off her reading glasses. She folded them and set them on the tablecloth. Without them, her face looked softer. Older. More tired.
“When my husband died,” she said, “people came for about a month. They brought casseroles. They sent cards. Then they stopped. Everybody went back to their lives. That’s what people do. I understand it. I did it myself, for other people, for years.” She looked out the window at the oak
tree. “And then it was just me. In this big house. With forty-two windows and nobody to look out of them with.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I was going to sell the house,” she said. “That spring. Before I found your card at the library. I had a real estate agent coming on a Friday. I thought, what’s the point? What’s the point of staying here, just me and the dust?”
