“But you didn’t sell it.”
“No.” She turned back to me. “Because you came on Thursday. And you cleaned my oven. And you lined my picture frames up with the dust marks so they wouldn’t move a quarter of an inch.”
She almost smiled. “Do you know how long it had been since anyone paid that kind of attention to anything in this house? To anything of mine?”
I shook my head.
“You gave me a reason to get up on Thursdays,” she said. “And then your little girl came on that snow day and counted my windows. And I realized I’d lived in this house for forty years and never once counted them myself. I’d stopped looking. At everything. And that little girl with her
glasses sliding down her nose, she looked at everything.”
She reached over and touched the snow day drawing with one finger.
“I called Susan that night. For the first time in months, I had something to tell her. I said, ‘My house
has forty-two windows. Did you know that?’ And she said, ‘Mom, are you okay? You sound happy.’”
I was crying now. I couldn’t stop.
“And then I fell,” she said quietly. “In the bathroom. On a Tuesday night. I lay on that floor for a day and a half. And I wasn’t scared, Carly. That’s the strange part. I was cold, and I was in terrible pain, and I knew I might die there. But I wasn’t scared. Because I kept thinking, It’s Tuesday.
