The Notebook on Evelyn’s Nightstand

Then Janet turned the page. Then she turned another one.

I watched her go through maybe ten pages that way, and each one a little faster, like somebody hunting for a thing she was afraid to find. Then she stopped, and put her hand over her mouth.

Rosa had come to the funeral. Hospice nurses do, the good ones, when they can. She was sitting two tables over with the choir ladies in a plain black dress with her braid pinned up, and I saw her see that notebook. She set down her fork.

She got up, bad knee and all, and walked over to Janet and Paula’s table. I could not hear what she said at first. I picked up the tray of coffee, because it gave me a reason to cross the room, and I got close enough.

“I was your mother’s nurse,” Rosa was saying. “These last eight months. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” Janet said. It did not sound like her voice. She looked up. “Did you know about this?”

“The log? Yes, ma’am. I read it every week.”

Janet looked back down at the page. Her finger was on a line halfway down it. She started to read out loud.

“Asked at supper did Janet call. Told her not today.” Her voice was thin as paper. “Asked again at 7.”

That was as far as she got. Her voice gave out, the way a step gives out under you.

She held the notebook up to Rosa with both hands.

“You were there,” she said. “You read it. All of that day. I want to hear it right.”

Rosa looked over at me. I shook my head a little. I did not want it read. I had meant for them to take it home and open it at their own kitchen tables with the doors shut.

But Paula said, “Please.” And it was their mother.

Rosa took her reading glasses out of her dress pocket and put them on. She picked up the notebook. The tables on either side of us had gone quiet, the way a room does when people are pretending not to listen.

“February the ninth,” Rosa read. She has a carrying voice. “Ate good, most of a pork chop cut up small. All pills. Pressure 138 over 80. Asked at supper did Janet call. Told her not today. Asked again at 7 and at 8. Told her Janet is busy with the grandbabies and loves her. She said, ‘I know she’s busy. I just like to hear her.’ Slept by 9:30.”

Nobody at that table breathed.

“Is it all like that?” Paula said.

“There’s all kinds of things in it,” Rosa said gently.

“Read another one,” Janet said. “Any one. Just open it.”

“Janet,” I said. “You don’t have to do this here.”

She did not look at me. “Read another one.”

Rosa turned a thick handful of pages and let it fall open.

“July the twenty-second. Hot. Sat her on the back porch with the fan. She shelled a whole bowl of peas with her good hand and would not let me help. Told me how Paula at four years old ate a raw pea off the vine and spit it clear across the garden and said, ‘That’s not cooked.’ Laughed till she coughed. Good day. One of the best.”

Paula made a sound I had never heard a grown woman make, and put her face in her napkin.