The Notebook on Evelyn’s Nightstand

Her car was in the drive with the trunk up. She was on the back steps, next to the ramp Steve built, in an old sweatshirt and no makeup, with a cup of gas station coffee gone cold beside her. She looked ten years older than she had at the funeral. She looked like her mother.

The notebook was on her knees.

“I read it,” she said. “All of it. It took me the three weeks. I could only do a little at a time.” She squared it on her lap. “I’m going to say some things and I’d be obliged if you let me get through them, because I practiced in the car and I’ll lose it otherwise.”

“All right.”

“I quit coming because she didn’t know me. That day she called me Dorothy. I sat out in that driveway right there and I thought, my mother is already gone, and I am not strong enough to come visit a stranger wearing her face. And I let that be my reason for five years.” She was not crying. Janet does not. Her voice had just gone flat and thin. “And she wasn’t gone. She was in there the whole time. She was shelling peas. She was asking for me by name. I’d have known that if I’d come. It’s all right here. I’d have known.”

“She had bad days,” I said. “The day you saw was a real day too.”

“Don’t be nice to me. Not yet.” She took a breath. “The card. The twenty-five dollars. I picked that out. I stood in the store and thought, what’s appropriate, like you were the lady who watered the plants. And the key.” She shut her eyes. “I asked you for the key because I was scared to walk in that house, and I thought if I made it a piece of business, with a realtor and a list, I could get through it. That’s what I do. I make it business. That’s the reason. It’s a poor one.”

She opened her eyes and looked straight at me.

“You told her I called,” she said. “Twelve times. I counted. You lied to my mother twelve times so she’d think her daughter loved her, and you asked God to forgive you for it.” Her chin went, then, just for a second, Evelyn’s chin. “It should have been me asking. Thank you, Lori. I am ashamed, and I am sorry, and thank you. I don’t know how to say it any bigger than that.”

It came out stiff as a board, every word of it. She had plainly said it to her windshield all the way down Highway 63.

It was the realest thing anybody had said to me in six years.

“That’s big enough,” I said.

I sat down on the step beside her. It was cold through my jeans.

After a bit she reached in her sweatshirt pocket and held something out. It was the key, with its dab of red polish.

“I called the realtor off,” she said. “Paula and I talked. There’s no hurry selling. We want to go through things slow, the three of us and Steve, and we want you to have first pick of whatever you’d like of hers. And I’d like you to have a key to this house as long as there’s a house. It was wrong to take it. You’re the one who knows where everything is.”

I took it. I am not too proud to say it felt good going back on the ring.