The Notebook That Spoke For Her

Kim had her napkin pressed to her mouth.

“Wednesday. She scratched her arm raw in the night, I don’t know why, maybe the itching from the new medication. Brenda dressed it before I even finished calling the agency, she must have heard it in my voice.”

Brenda, three chairs down, said quietly, “I remember that week,” and nobody asked her to speak, she just did, and it landed harder for not being asked. “I was out there Tuesdays and Thursdays for three years,” she said, looking at Craig, not unkindly. “Everything in that book is exactly what I saw with my own eyes. Your sister never once wrote down a bad day she didn’t live through first.”

“Thursday,” I went on, because I had started and it seemed wrong to stop in the middle. “She called me by a name that isn’t anybody’s name in our family. I don’t have a sister. I sat with her forty minutes while she cried and couldn’t tell me why.”

“Friday,” I said. “Dave came straight from his shift so I could go watch Allie’s game. Mom asked him three times who he was. He told her three times, patient as anything, the man I married.”

I looked up at Dave when I read that part. He didn’t say a word. He just reached over and put his hand flat on the table, the way he had at the start of the night, like he was holding the whole evening steady for me.

“Saturday,” I read. “Good day. She sat at the piano and played Blessed Assurance start to finish without a mistake and for three minutes she knew exactly who I was and told me I always sang flat.”

My voice went then. Allie reached across the table and took my free hand, and I finished the week anyway, because Joyce, the church pianist who used to sit near my mother every Sunday, was watching me from the far end of the table with tears running straight down her face, not trying to hide them.

“Sunday,” I said. “Nothing good to write. Some days there isn’t.”

I closed the notebook.

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Then Craig looked up, and for the first time that whole night, he looked at me instead of at his plate, and his eyes were wet, and he did not wipe them, which from Craig was new.

It was Kim who spoke first.

“Craig,” she said, setting her fork down careful, like she’d been building up to it the whole meal. “I need to say something and I need you to let me finish before you say anything back.”