The Can Of Soup At The Door
It was not groceries I was going to Rennick’s for. It was the sound of somebody saying “Morning, Len.”
Now the tremor.
It started about four years ago. I thought it was the coffee. Then my signature on a check started to look like a seismograph, and Dr. Amato in Clarksville ran his tests and came back with two words: essential tremor. Not Parkinson’s, he said, and said it twice because he could see my face. It does not kill you. It makes everything you pick up an argument. A cup of coffee, a razor, a hymnal. In the cold it is worse. In front of people it is worse. When someone is watching me and I am trying to hold a thing still, it gets so loud in my hands I could swear they hear it.
That Tuesday it was 24 degrees. I had gone back to the house for my pill and swallowed it dry in the truck, and the pill had not yet had time to do anything. I had a cart handle in one hand and an envelope in the other and not enough hands left to read it by.
The envelope was Mildred’s.
It was the last list she wrote, in the second week of September, at the kitchen table, on the back of an envelope from the electric company, with a pencil that always needed sharpening. She was too tired by then to go herself, so she wrote it for me. Her handwriting had gone small and slanted, the letters leaning on each other. Milk. Eggs. Bread (the soft kind). Bananas, not too green. And at the bottom: Soup, the noodle. 2 cans. For when you don’t feel like cooking.
She died four days later.
I never wrote another list. I carry that envelope in my shirt pocket, folded in four and soft as cloth by now, and every Tuesday I buy what it says. I eat one can a week. The other goes to Hazel Beck, the widow next door, who has a bad hip and does not drive anymore. I leave it on her porch, ring the bell, and go home before she can open the door. She says it is the best soup in Missouri. It is the same brand they sell at every store in America.
So on aisle 6 I had the envelope in one hand and the cart handle in the other and the cold in my knuckles, and I reached up for the soup and my fingers jumped. The first can rolled off the shelf and I caught it against my chest. The basket had a gallon of milk sitting crooked in the front, and I was afraid of tipping it. So I did what I have done a hundred times with my keys and my glasses when I need both hands for something. I slid the can into my jacket pocket, thinking, just for a second, while I steady this cart and find the other one.