“So do I.”
“I want to explain what was going through my head.”
“Will it change what happened?”
“No.”
“Then just stay here a minute.”
He did.
Eventually, I told him about lifting the foil off the pot roast at eight o’clock. About wondering whether to call the hospital. About feeling foolish when the text arrived because I had spent the whole evening afraid something had happened to him.
He covered his face.
I let him hear all of it.
When I finished, he moved his chair closer, but he did not touch me until I reached for his hand.
My sixty-fifth birthday approached without any discussion of money.
My son asked what I wanted.
“Dinner at five. Here. And if plans change, a telephone call.”
“We’ll be there.”
“I want to believe you.”
“I know.”
At four forty-five, their car pulled up.
I was still fastening an earring.
My daughter-in-law carried a salad. My son carried a cake. The children came through the doorway with a flat parcel wrapped in brown paper.
“We have to give you this first,” my granddaughter said.
They sat me at the kitchen table.
Inside was a small handmade book. Its cover was crooked, its pages tied together with blue yarn.
Grandma’s Better Things.
I looked at the children.
My grandson began turning pages before I could speak.
There was a drawing of my checkerboard. Cinnamon toast with enormous clouds of steam. The rosebush beside the porch. My old kitchen radio.
Under each picture, they had written a memory.
My granddaughter touched a page near the back.
“We started it for your last birthday.”
The kitchen went still.
My son set the cake down.
“They made it at home,” he said. “It was already wrapped.”
I looked up at him.
“I told them we weren’t going that night. Then I put it in a cupboard.”
He swallowed.
“They found it when we packed.”
My granddaughter leaned against my shoulder.
“We added more pages.”
I turned to the first drawing.
It showed five people at my table, all with their hands reaching toward a lopsided brown roast.
