Ludie’s room was dim, with one lamp on low. The navy hat was on the shelf where it always lived. Somebody had pinned my photograph to the bed rail, where she could see it, and the oxygen machine was humming at four.
I pulled the chair to the bed and took her hand. It was warm and papery and nearly weightless.
“There you are,” she whispered. “I told them you’d come.”
“I’m here, Miss Ludie.”
“I heard you got let go on my account.”
“It was worth it.”
“That’s what I told Lyle.” Her mouth did something that was nearly a smile. “I wrote that boy a letter. Don’t you fight him, Joelle. He’s not a bad man. He’s a frightened one.”
“I won’t.”
She turned her head toward the photograph and looked at it for a long time, in the lamplight.
“Joelle,” she said. “Do you think it remembered me?”
I had to wait a moment before I could say anything.
“I think it did,” I said. “I think it’s been waiting on you for seventy years.”
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“Burl said it would.”
“He was right.”
“He usually was.” She closed her eyes. “That was a fine day. That was the finest day I’ve had since I don’t know when.”
Those were nearly the last words she said to me. Dee came and sat on the other side. Roz stood in the doorway with her arms crossed against her chest, and I held on, and the machine hummed, and sometime before five in the morning, with her feet bare on top of the blanket, Ludie Dot Cobb went to tell her husband about it.
I sat there until the window turned gray. I did not want to leave her yet, and Dee did not make me.
At a quarter past six, I heard a step in the corridor. I looked up, and Lyle Brannock was standing in the doorway in his raincoat with his car keys still in his hand.
He had not known. Nobody had called him. He had come in early, like he always did, and the night nurse had been too busy and too stubborn to dial.
He looked at the bed. He looked at the hat on the shelf, and the photograph pinned to the rail, and at me sitting there, a woman he had fired, with Ludie’s hand still in mine.
He could have asked me to leave. It was his building and I had no business in it. I was waiting for him to say it.
“Take all the time you need,” Lyle said. His voice was strange. “Nobody will bother you.”
Then he walked down the hall to his office.
Dee told me later what he saw there. He walked up the corridor past a wall of index cards, fifty-eight of them, taped in a column from his door to the baseboard. He read every one standing up with his raincoat on.
On his blotter lay a sheet of facility stationery, folded in thirds. On the front, in shaky pencil, it said Lyle. Roz had laid it there on Tuesday afternoon, as Ludie asked, with instructions that it was only to be opened when she was gone. My badge still hung on the brass hook behind the door.
The Courier came out on Thursday morning, the way it has every Thursday since 1921. The front page was my photograph, three columns wide, with Ludie in the foam and her good hat on and the pelicans behind her.