The Thirty First Call From The Hospital

“You tell my son that I asked for him, and that he didn’t come. Tell him plain. Don’t dress it up to spare him.”

“Evelyn,” I whispered.

“Hush. I’m not through.” She took a breath. “And then you tell him that it was all right. You tell him his mother did not die alone or frightened, because the best thing he ever did in his life was sitting right here holding on to me.”

I couldn’t see anymore. I just held on.

“I prayed for a daughter for thirty years,” she said. “The Lord took his time and sent her to me by marriage. This girl has been at my back door every day for eleven years. She has cut my toenails. She has sat through my stories. She has let me tell everybody at church her pie was better than mine when we both know it isn’t.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “It isn’t even close.”

“No, it isn’t. But you’ll get there.” She patted my hand. “You tell Keith that whatever he went looking for out there, he had better at home, and he never had the sense to know it. His father didn’t either. You tell him she called him thirty-one times and then she stopped, and she was right to stop.”

She was getting tired. The words were coming with more space between them.

“And you tell him I said she doesn’t owe him one thing more. Not one. She’s paid up. Tell him his mother said so.”

Pastor Dan’s voice was rough. “I’ll tell him, Evelyn. Word for word.”

“See that you do. In front of people, if you have to. He listens better in front of people.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned her face back to me. The clear look was already going soft at the edges, like a window fogging.

“Tracey.”

“I’m right here.”

“There’s dough in the icebox. Don’t you let it go to waste.”

“I won’t.”

“Wear the apron Saturday.”

“I will.”

“Both of them, if you want. Tie mine on over yours.” She smiled, just barely. “Close enough. Isn’t that what I always said?”

“That’s what you always said.”

“Well. I was being modest.”

She slept after that. She did not wake again.

Pastor Dan said the Lord’s Prayer and I said it with him, and Denise, who I found out later is Baptist, said it too, with the debts instead of the trespasses, half a beat off from us.

Evelyn went at five forty-two in the morning, with the east window just going from black to gray. It was very easy. It was just one breath, and then a long wait, and then not another one.

Denise checked her watch and wrote it down. Then she came around the bed and put her arms around me, a perfect stranger, and held on like kin.

“I have been doing this twenty-two years,” she said into my hair. “I’m going to remember that one.”

I went back to Ash Street as the sun came up. I couldn’t go home yet.

The kitchen was just how I had left it. Flour on the floor. The rolling pin under the refrigerator. Half a crust on the board, gone dry and cracked around the edges.

I got down and fished out the rolling pin. I threw away the dry crust. I took the dough out of the icebox, and I tied on my apron, and then I tied hers on over it, and I rolled out four pie shells on Evelyn’s board with the morning coming through her yellow curtains.