Cabel lifts his chin slightly and puts the car into drive. “Maybe.”
4:15 p.m.
When there’s a knock at the screen door, Janie rouses herself from a nap on the couch, her mother safely tucked away in her room. She fluffs her hair and grabs her glasses.
It’s Rabinowitz.
“Hi. Come in,” Janie says, surprised.
He’s carrying a box in one hand and a basket of fruit in the other. He brings them inside and puts them on the kitchen counter. “This is to help sweeten your sorrow,” he says.
Janie is overcome. “Thank you.” The words seem too small to express what she is feeling.
He smiles and excuses himself. “I’m still on duty but I wanted to drop them off. I’m sorry for your loss, Janie.” He waves and ducks out the door.
All of the nice.
All of it.
It only makes it harder.
4:28 p.m.
Lies back down on the couch, full of cake.
Thinks about what happens next.
Knows that soon she’ll say good-bye to Cabe forever.
And that?
Despite the benefits, Will be the hardest thing she’s ever done.
6:04 p.m.
She walks up Henry’s bumpy driveway, backpack on her back, carrying a suitcase and a bag of clothes. Two forlorn boxes rest in front of the door. Janie goes inside to deposit her stuff and then pulls the boxes inside.
She rips open the first box and pulls out a baby’s snowsuit. Goes over the ancient computer and turns it on. Rifles through the notebook that contains the order log, then opens the file drawer under the table. Repackages the snowsuit and writes the address on the box.
Janie opens the second box. Pulls out a bubble-wrapped package.
A snow globe.
It’s not listed as an item that needs to be shipped out.
It’s for Cathy, she’s sure.
Paris. Janie shakes the globe and watches the golden, glittery snow swirling about the gray plastic Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.
How stunningly tacky.
Yet totally full of a certain sort of special.
Janie smiles, wraps it up again and puts it back in the box. Writes on the box with a black marker:
TO CATHY, ONE LAST GIFT.
FROM HENRY.
Janie finishes her father’s business and then she searches, and finds, the ancient rental agreement. Discovers that Henry’s been month-to-month since 1987, just mailing in a check faithfully so it arrives by the first of each month. It’ll be easy continuing on from here.
Oh, she’ll let the landlord know Henry passed on. But she’ll make it very tempting for the landlord to accept Janie as the new tenant. She can even pay the first year in advance if she has to.
She shuts down the computer.
Pulls the sheets off the bed and puts them in the little old washing machine. Decides she’s going to clean up the place and sleep here tonight.
Here, in her new home.
It’s such a freaking huge relief.
MEMORIES
8:43 p.m. Still the funeral day.
The first evening in her new place. Isolation, day one.
Laundry done, house dusted, sandwich eaten, grocery list made, Janie sits on her new bed with
Henry’s shoe box full of memories.
Inside: fourteen letters from Dottie five unopened letters to Dottie from Henry, marked “Return to Sender” a small, tarnished medal from a high school cross-country team a class ring two envelopes containing photographs a loonie and a silver dollar nine paper clips an old driver’s license and a folded piece of paper
Gingerly, Janie takes the photographs out of the envelopes and looks through them. Snapshots of Dorothea—tons of them. Photos of the two of them, laughing. Having fun. Kissing and lying together on the beach, blissful smiles on their faces. On the big gray rocks by Lake Michigan, a sign in the background that says “Navy Pier.” They look good together. Dorothea is pretty, especially when she smiles. Unbelievable.
Janie also recognizes the living room in the pictures. Henry with his feet propped up on the same coffee table, the same old curtains on the windows, Dorothea stretched out on the same old crappy couch, although it all looks nearly new in the photos. Everything’s the same. Janie looks again at the photos of the happy couple.
Well, maybe not everything is the same.
Janie puts the photos in chronological order according to the red digital time stamp marked on the corner of each picture, and she imagines the courtship. The whirlwind summer of 1986 where they worked together at Lou’s in Chicago, then there’s a break from photos in the fall—that must have been the time they were separated, Dottie in high school and Henry at U of M. Janie peeks at the letters in the shoe box from Dorothea and sees the mail stamps on each opened envelope—all were marked from August 27 through October of that year. Fourteen handwritten letters in two months, Janie thinks. That’s love.
The second group of photos begin in mid-November of 1986 and the last photo is stamped April
1, 1987. April Fool’s Day. Go figure. Janie does the math backward from her birthday, January 9, 1988. That’s about right, she thinks. Nine months before would have been April 9, 1987. Not much time went by after the last photo before they made a baby, and then it was splitsville.
She fingers the letters, extremely curious. Over-whelmingly curious. Dead freaking curious. She even picks up the first one and runs her index finger along the fold of the letter inside the envelope. But then she puts it down.