The Green Notes on My Furniture

The first one I saw was blue, and it was stuck to the glass of my china cabinet at about the height of my son’s shoulder.

I was standing in my own front door on an aluminum walker with a new right hip. I had been out of my house seventeen days, three in the hospital and fourteen in the swing bed unit, and Loretta was behind me with my overnight bag and the plastic sack of things they send home with you. I had been thinking about my own bed for two weeks. I had been thinking about my own coffee cup.

“Go on in, Marjorie,” Loretta said. “I’ve got the door.”

I did not go on in. I stood on the mat and looked at that little blue square.

It had a K on it. Black marker, a capital K, made the way Kevin has made it since third grade, with the leg kicked out too far.

“What is that?” I said.

Loretta did not answer. Loretta Hobbs has lived across the street from me for thirty-one years, and in thirty-one years I have never known her to be without an answer. She set my bag down on the floor very carefully, the way you set down something that might break.

I moved the walker forward. Lift, set, step. Lift, set, step. That was how they had taught me, and I did it right even then, because I had not spent two weeks learning to walk again to fall in my own front room.

There was a blue note on the arm of Walt’s recliner.

There was a blue note on the roll-top desk.

There was a yellow one on the piano, right on the fallboard above middle C, and a yellow one on the dining table, and a yellow one on the hall tree where Walt’s cap still hung because I had never found the right day to take it down.

There was a pink one on my mother’s treadle sewing machine. There was a pink one on the back of the rocking chair, the one I had rocked all three of them in, through croup and chicken pox and the night Dawn’s appendix came out.

“Loretta,” I said.

“I know it,” she said. “I saw them Monday when I came over to water your fern. I didn’t know how to tell you in that place. I thought you ought to be standing in your own house.”

I went through every room. It took a long time on a walker. Loretta came behind me and did not say one word, and I counted, because I am a person who counts. I kept the books for the Page County road department for twenty-six years and I have never in my life been able to look at a thing without wanting the total.

Twenty-three.

Nine blue. Eight yellow. Six pink.

The cedar chest at the foot of my bed had two, a yellow and a pink side by side, and under them in pencil, in Stacy’s hand, one word and a question mark.

“Talk?”

They had not been able to settle the cedar chest. They were going to talk about it.

I came back to the kitchen and sat down in the chair with arms, the one the therapist had told me to use. Loretta put the kettle on without asking.

There was a note on the counter. Not a sticky one. A sheet off the pad I keep by the phone, in Stacy’s round schoolgirl handwriting.