The Pencil Marks on My Pantry Door

I heard the front door before I heard the voices.

“The kitchen is original,” a woman said. “But it’s solid. They built them solid in 1956.”

I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the back bedroom with one shoe on and the other in my lap. Shoes take me a while now. My left hand does about half of what I ask it, and I have learned to ask politely and wait.

I sat very still and listened to strangers walk across my living room floor.

I got the other shoe on. I got the cane under me, the one with the four little feet that the therapist at the hospital calls a quad cane and I call the milking stool. I went up the hall at the speed I go.

They were standing in my kitchen doorway. A young couple, late twenties, still in their jackets because it was the first cold morning of September and the wind was coming straight down out of the Dakotas. He had a sheet of paper in his hand. I could see a color photograph of my own front porch on it, with my own mums in the pot by the step.

Under the photograph it said $214,000.

Under that, in smaller letters, it said motivated seller.

Behind them stood a woman of about fifty in a navy blazer with a gold name bar on the lapel. She had a ring of keys in her hand, and one of those keys was mine. I knew it by the green rubber cap on it. I bought that cap at the hardware store on Court Street so I could find the house key in my purse without my glasses.

Nobody said anything for a moment. The young man’s mouth was a little open. The girl had hold of his sleeve.

“Mrs. Weber,” the woman in the blazer said. Her face had gone the color of paste. “I was told you were in care.”

I had been, until the night before.

I will set the facts down plainly, because none of the rest makes sense without them. I had my stroke the fourth of August. I was a week in the hospital here in Beatrice, and then they sent me to a rehabilitation hospital in Lincoln for five weeks. I was to come home on a Friday, and Kim was to fetch me.

On Tuesday the therapists said I had met every goal on their chart and could go three days early. I asked my neighbor Harriet to come for me. I told the desk I would telephone my daughter myself, and then I did not, because I had a notion of calling her from my own kitchen and surprising her.

Harriet drove me home after supper. She brought me in by the alley and the back door, in the dark, because that is the short walk from a car.

So I had not been out front. I had not seen the sign in my own yard, or the little gray box hanging on my front doorknob with my key inside it. They had both been there nine days.

I want to explain about my talking, because it matters to the rest of this.

Since the stroke, the words are all still there. Every one of them. I can see the sentence I want like wash on a line. But my mouth has to go down that line one clothespin at a time, and people do not always wait. They jump in. They guess the end. My own daughter does it more than anyone.