The Cards I Kept in the Bottom Drawer

“I didn’t want a card because I wanted to be in trouble,” she said. “I wanted a card because I wanted you to look. Just once. I wanted you to look at me for as long as you looked at Kip.”

I said, “I looked at you every day.”

“You looked at me like I was a clock that was running right,” she said. “You checked, and you saw it was fine, and you went on.”

I did not argue. She was right. I had checked, and it had been fine, and I had never once sat down beside her in a little chair with my knees up around my ears and waited.

Before we hung up she asked what the sheriff had said, and I told her about the dog, and the sidewalk. She laughed, a wet, astonished laugh. “I did it every day for a year,” she said. “Mom, that dog was the size of a pony.”

She came on Saturday.

She drove down from Fort Wayne with Eli, who is sixteen now, long-legged, and looks so much like Ode around the jaw that I had to turn to the stove. She did not call ahead. At four in the afternoon her car was in the drive, and she sat in it a full minute with both hands on the wheel. I did not go out. I had learned something in thirty-six years about when to wait.

Then she came to the kitchen door and stood on the step with her coat open. She is forty-six. She has my mouth. I had somehow never noticed.

“I brought a casserole,” she said. “Eli picked it.”

“I can see that,” I said.

And then Eli, who is sixteen and has no patience for the choreography of women, said, “Grandma, where’s the drawer?”

We sat on the dining room floor all that evening. Eli built me a nest of couch cushions, and I sat with my back against the oak desk while my daughter, cross-legged in front of me, read the half sheets out loud, one at a time. The janitor’s cat. The shoes at gym. The boy with the cereal box.

By ten o’clock we had two piles, the ones we knew where to find and the ones we did not. The first was larger than I would have guessed. One of them, a girl who would not talk, runs the front desk of the funeral home that buried Ode. I had stood in front of her while she handed me the tissue box, and I had not known.

Kip phoned that afternoon to ask after my hip, and whether Shanna had come. Then he said, “Mrs. Lindquist, would it be all right if I carried some of those? The ones in the county? I know where most of them live.” I said it would be more than all right.

So that is what we are doing, all winter. Forty cards a week. Shanna mails the Fort Wayne ones, I take the rest, on the walker, and Kip takes the county ones in the Tahoe with the light bar off. Seventy-eight cents each. It will come to four hundred and seventy-seven dollars and thirty-six cents for the lot, and I would pay it ten times over.