The Green Notes on My Furniture
I wrote the first one that afternoon with the black marker from the phone drawer, the same marker, I expect, that Kevin had used.
I did not want to be clever, and I did not want to be mean. I only wanted to write down what was true, the way I used to write a figure in a ledger. A ledger does not have an opinion.
“Loretta. Came every day I was in rehab.”
I stuck it on the hall table by the front door, where she drops her keys when she comes in.
She found it the next morning. She stood there with her purse on her arm and read it, and then she read it again.
“Well, that’s silly,” she said.
She wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand.
“What’s it get me? The hall table?”
“It doesn’t get you anything. It isn’t that kind of note.”
“What kind is it, then?”
“It’s the kind that says who was here.”
She nodded slowly. Then she picked up my jacket and held it for me, and we went to therapy.
After that I kept the pad in my cardigan pocket.
The women from my circle at the Methodist church had a sign-up sheet going before I was ever discharged. Tuesdays and Thursdays, supper at five. Connie brought chicken and noodles and a bowl of mashed potatoes to put them over. Barb brought ham balls, which she makes better than anybody in the county and knows it. Jan brought scalloped corn and a pan of scotcheroos, and then rolled up her sleeves and washed every dish in my sink, including the ones that were not hers.
“Jan, leave those.”
“Hush, Marjorie. Sit on your new hip.”
That one went on the edge of the dining table, an inch from Stacy’s yellow.
“Connie, Barb, Jan. Suppers. Jan did my dishes.”
I changed the number every week. By the end it said eight.
Pastor Tom came Tuesdays at ten, after therapy. He is a tall, stooped man of about sixty who farmed with his father before he went to seminary, and he still looks at the sky before he looks at you. The first time, he stood in my front room with his hat in his hand and looked at the blue note on Walt’s recliner, and then at me, and he did not ask.
What he asked was this.
“Marjorie, would it be all right if I sat in Walt’s chair? Or would you rather I took the davenport?”
Four years, and nobody had ever asked me that. People either avoided that chair as if it were roped off or dropped into it without a thought.
“You sit there,” I said. “He’d like it used.”
He read me Psalm 121. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. He has a plain reading voice, no organ in it, and that is why I can stand to listen.
When he left I wrote the note and put it on the arm, right beside Kevin’s.
“Pastor Tom. Asked before he sat.”
Then there was Hannah.
Hannah is Stacy’s girl. She turned sixteen in June and got her license in July, and she drives a Chevy that is older than she is.
She had come to see me in the swing bed four times, straight from school in Shenandoah, nineteen miles on Highway 2. She would do her algebra on the foot of my bed and eat the pudding off my tray.
The Friday I came home, she pulled in at half past four with a duffel bag and her pillow.