What Linda Ames Said at the Door

Linda

Linda Ames was sixty-six. She had taught piano to half the children in town, including me, a long time ago, and she still played for the Methodist church on the second and fourth Sundays. She came down the hall in a blue quilted robe and a pair of pink slippers, with her hair in a scarf for the night.

“Roger, who is it at this hour,” she said, and then she saw me.

She knew me. Of course she knew me. She had been at the funeral. I had seen her in the third row on the left with her hands folded on her purse. Roger had not been beside her. I had not thought about it until that minute.

She looked at my dress. She looked at the cardigan. And then she looked past me, past both of us, over my shoulder at the van parked at the curb under the streetlight.

You could see Bo from the porch. His face was against the window, his glasses pushed up crooked, his mouth open the way it always was when he slept hard.

Linda put her hand on her husband’s arm and moved him out of the doorway. She did not push him. She just moved him, the way you move a chair.

“Linda,” Roger said.

She walked right past me. She went down those porch steps in her pink slippers and down the cold sidewalk to my van, and she opened the side door without asking, and she leaned in.

When she came back up the walk, she was carrying June. June was asleep with her head on Linda’s shoulder and the carnation still in her fist, and one of her shoes was falling off.

Linda stopped on the bottom step and looked up at her husband.

“Roger Ames,” she said. “Did you put this girl’s things out today.”

He did not answer right away.

“This was the day,” she said. “Today. I was there at two o’clock. Where did you think I was?”

“You said a funeral,” he said. “You didn’t say whose.”

“I told you Tuesday. I told you at supper.”

“I didn’t put it together.”

“You didn’t ask,” she said. Not loud. Just plain. “Forty-four years, Roger. You never once ask.”

Then she said to me, “Jenna, get the other two. The beds are made upstairs. They’ve been made since Easter.”