The Notebook on Evelyn’s Nightstand

Steve was gone five days out of seven. That was the job, and the job was what paid our mortgage and kept the health insurance that I was on. He left Sunday after dinner and he was back Friday night if the loads ran right. When he was home he was at his mother’s. He built the ramp off her back steps in a single Saturday. He sat with her Saturday nights so I could sleep in my own bed, and Sunday mornings he carried her to the car and took her to church for as long as she could go.

But he was not there on a Wednesday at two in the morning, and he knew it.

The night she died, he had made it home. Rosa, the hospice nurse, had told us on Thursday it would be days, and Steve called his dispatcher from the driveway and said he would not be taking Sunday’s load, and the man did not argue.

Rosa had been coming for eight months by then. Evelyn’s heart was failing on top of everything else, and her doctor had finally said the word hospice. She was a short, square woman about sixty with gray in her braid. The first visit, she picked up the green notebook off the nightstand and read for ten minutes without sitting down.

“Who told you to do this?” she said.

“The nurse at the rehab. Years ago.”

“You keep right on. Put the comfort medicines in here too, the time and the amount. This is better than what I’ve got in my computer.”

Evelyn went on a Sunday, just before six in the morning. Steve was on one side of the bed and I was on the other. He had her hand in both of his, and those are big hands, and I watched him hold it like something he was afraid of breaking.

When it was over, and Rosa had come and done what she had to do, and the men from the funeral home had come and gone, I found Steve out in the driveway, sitting on the back bumper of my car in the cold.

I sat down by him.

“I read some of your book,” he said. “Last night, when you were dozing. I never had before.”

“All right.”

“There’s a Tuesday in there, three years back. Says she fell getting out of the tub and you got her up off the floor by yourself. Took you forty minutes. Says you both sat on the bathroom floor and ate crackers after.” He rubbed his face. “You know where I was that Tuesday? I looked at the date. I was in Salt Lake, eating a steak. I remember because it was a good steak.”

“Steve.”

“You told me on the phone she’d had a little spill.”

“She had.”

“Lori.” His voice came apart some. “That was my mother. And I let you do it. I sent the money home and I let you do it, and I told myself that was my half.”

I took his hand. I did not tell him it was fine. He would have known I was only being kind.

“It was a lot,” I said. “And you were where you had to be. Both of those.”

We sat there until the sun was over the neighbor’s garage.

That night I could not sleep, and I sat at my own kitchen table with the notebook and read it front to back. It took me until three. When I finished I knew two things.