The Green Notes on My Furniture
That afternoon while she was in the shower I wrote hers and put it on the back of the couch.
“Hannah. Slept here in her shoes.”
She never said a word about it. But the next time she came, I noticed she had straightened it.
There is one more thing the green notes did, and it is the part I did not see coming.
Around the third week, the girl at the therapy desk turned her screen toward me.
“Mrs. Dunn, I’m just updating your chart. We still have Stacy as your emergency contact and the person with a key to the house. Is that right?”
I opened my mouth to say yes. It had been right for four years.
And I thought about the hall table. I thought, if I went down in my kitchen at two o’clock on a Wednesday, who would come? Not who loved me. I never doubted they loved me. Who would come.
Loretta was forty feet from my front door and had come every single day.
“Put Loretta Hobbs first,” I said. “Then Stacy.”
It was not a punishment. I want that understood. It was only the truth, and I do not think I would have looked straight at it if I had not been writing it down on little green squares for three weeks.
That night I called Loretta over and told her, and asked if she would carry a key.
“Stacy has your spare,” she said.
“I know she does.”
Loretta looked at me over her glasses.
“You’re going to ask for it back.”
“I’m going to ask for it back.”
“That’ll smart.”
“I expect it will,” I said. “It smarted me.”
By the end of the fourth week I was on a cane, and Loretta had driven me to therapy eleven times. I offered her gas money on the third trip and she would not speak to me until Clarinda Avenue. I did not offer again. I changed her note instead.
“Loretta. Came every day I was in rehab. Drove me to therapy 11 times. Would not take gas money.”
On the Monday after my last session I sat down at the kitchen table with the phone.
I had decided two things. I was going to have every person on a green note into my house on Sunday afternoon for coffee and bars, to thank them properly, in person, like a Christian woman. And I was going to have my children come an hour ahead.
An hour ahead, and alone. I did not want an audience for it. I could have let them walk in at two o’clock with fourteen people holding coffee cups, and Lord forgive me, there was a day in the first week when I would have enjoyed it. But shaming them in front of the church was not what I was after.
I called Kevin first.
“I’m having some people in Sunday at two. Folks who helped me out. I’d like you and your sisters here at one.”
“What’s at one?”
“Family.”
“All right,” he said. “One o’clock.”
Stacy said, “We’ll be there, Mom,” before I had finished. Dawn only said, “Thank you for calling.”
Sunday after church Loretta came over in her good slacks and started cutting bars in my kitchen.
“You want me to make myself scarce at one?” she asked.
“I want you to stay right where you are and cut bars.”