The Letter in My Sock Drawer

Wed. Dec. 3. Slept most of the day. Woke at four and asked if Arlene brought the coffee.

I turned the page. I turned another.

Thurs. Dec. 4. Bad afternoon. Did not know me till supper. Asked for Arlene.

Fri. Dec. 5. Asked for Arlene.

Down the page they went. Day after day, the same three words in the margin, in that tidy hand, like a rosary. Asked for Arlene. Asked for Arlene.

“I don’t,” I said, and stopped. My voice had gone somewhere. “I didn’t know she did that.”

“Every day,” Margie said. “Five, six times. I’d tell her you were coming Sunday and she’d say, ‘Is it Sunday?’ And I’d say no. And she’d ask again in an hour.”

“You never said.”

“What was I going to say?” My sister’s voice had a rough edge on it. “Your mother spent all week asking for you? You were forty-five minutes away with a job. What would that have done but hurt you?”

I turned another page. Then I came to a Sunday.

Sun. Dec. 7. Did not go. Aide says Arlene came at one, stayed till four. Mom ate all her pudding. Sang Abide with Me, both verses. Best day this week.

I read it twice. The next line was in different ink, added later, a little crabbed.

Aide says after Arlene left, Mom asked for Margie three times.

I looked up.

“You didn’t go on Sundays,” I said.

“No.”

“I thought,” I started, and I couldn’t make the next part come. I tried again. “For fourteen months, Margie, I thought you stayed away on Sundays because you couldn’t stand to see me. I used to tell Mom, ‘She’s busy.’ She’d say, ‘Where’s Margie?’ and I’d feel my face get hot, because I thought you were making a point.”

“I know,” Margie said.

“You know?”

“I figured that’s what you thought. After Easter.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth, and I saw that her hand was shaking. “I stayed away on purpose. I was there six days. I was the one with the pills and the swallow tests and the bathing. Mom looked at me and saw a schedule. Then Sunday would come, and you’d walk in with that thermos and your good shoes, and she’d light up like somebody turned on a lamp. I wanted her to have that, one whole afternoon without me standing in the corner with a clipboard.”

She stopped. Her mouth moved.

“I wanted you to have the hymns,” she said.

And that was when my sister cried. It wasn’t loud. It came the way water comes through a ceiling, a little at a time, and then all at once. She put the heel of her hand against her eye and kept it there, and I saw her shoulders, the narrow ones, begin to shake.

I got up and came around the table. I did not say anything. I just put my coat-sleeved arm around her, and she let me, and this time she put hers around me too.

When she was able to talk, she sat back and blew her nose in a paper napkin and looked at me with her red eyes.

“I thought you’d been counting,” Margie said. “That was the thing. When you said you were the one she asked for. I thought, she’s been keeping score the whole time. Who got the most. Who was asked for. And I knew you were right, it was true, she did ask for you, I wrote it down six times a day. But I thought you’d been keeping score on me.”

“I thought you were,” I said.

“I know you did.”

“Margie, I was ashamed. I said it because I was ashamed.”

“I know.” She took my hand off her shoulder and held it, hard, on the oilcloth. “I said Sundays because I was jealous. I’d have given anything to be the one she lit up for. Then you handed me proof I’d been right to be jealous, and it all went to the wrong place.”

“You weren’t wrong about the onions,” I said.

She laughed. It surprised both of us. It came out wet and cracked, the real laugh, the one the whole restaurant used to turn around for, and for a second I was nine years old in a bed with my feet against hers.

“No,” my sister said. “I was not.”