The seventh time I had to initial the blue palliative care change sheet, my thumb left a gray smudge right over the line for scheduled morphine. Cedar Vale Hospice smelled like bleach and boiled cabbage, and by Thursday afternoons the floor nurse was always behind on the linen carts. Aunt Lorraine hated the sheets here. She kept trying to pick at the seams with her thumbnail like she was testing for loose thread on a flour sack, even though her hands had gone bird-thin and paper-dry since the first frost back in October.
I had been sleeping on the vinyl pull-out chair in Room 6 for four nights, my hip bones clicking against the springs every time I rolled over to check her IV pump. My husband Dwight kept calling from the house in Tupelo to ask if I wanted him to bring fresh underwear or more of those peppermint drops she liked, but I told him no because every time the door clicked open, Lorraine thought it was the meal tray and got mad about the carrots.
She was seventy-four years old and she had lived alone in the same four-room house off Highway 45 since Eisenhower was in office.
People in town always talked about her like she was a piece of furniture you inherited from an aunt you didn’t much care for. They called her dry. They said she had a face like a dried apple and a tongue to match because she wouldn’t let the kids run across her gravel driveway when the wild plums were dropping.
I am her niece Diane, and I spent thirty years believing she was just a bitter old maid who kept her church envelopes sorted by month and her pantry shelves lined with newspaper.
The Thursday Marcus started coming, the radiator in the hallway was clanking like someone hitting an empty propane tank with a ball-peen hammer. He walked into Room 6 right at two o’clock carrying a black Bible with the edges of the cover curled up from thumbs and a paperback book about southern bottomland birds that looked like he bought it at a library sale for fifty cents. He was maybe fifty, with hair going gray at the temples and forearms that looked like he spent his life working around engines or lumber. He didn’t wear a white coat or carry a clipboard, which was the first thing that made me suspicious because everybody who walked through those double doors wanted a signature or a copay.
He didn’t look at me like I was the person in charge. He just nodded, pulled a folding metal chair out from the corner by the washbasin, and sat down three inches from the metal rail of Lorraine’s bed.
He opened the bird book to a dog-eared page about wood ducks.
Lorraine didn’t open her eyes right away. She stayed turned toward the pale green wall where the church ladies’ quilt hung with its crooked blue squares that didn’t quite match at the corners. But her shoulders dropped about an inch.
Marcus didn’t try to make small talk with me about the weather or how long she had left. He just started reading in a voice that sounded like gravel being turned over with a flat shovel. Low and steady and not trying to sound like a preacher on the radio.
He read two pages about nesting habits before Lorraine turned her head on the flat hospital pillow.
She looked at his shoes first. They were brown leather oxfords, polished until the toes caught the dull glare of the ceiling fluorescent, though there was a little splatter of dry mud right on the welt where the heel met the sole.
She stayed quiet for a long time after he finished the section on the wood ducks.
Then she said, “That book has too many big words for a Thursday.”
Marcus didn’t get flustered. He just closed the cover with a soft slap against his palm. “My grandmother said the same thing about the dictionary, Mrs. Gable. But the birds don’t care about the adjectives.”
“They aren’t your birds,” she muttered, and closed her eyes again.
By the third Thursday, the routine had settled into the room like dust. Marcus came at two. He brought the book, but he didn’t always read from it. Sometimes he just sat there and told her about the road crews out on Highway 6 or how the pecans were coming in down by the bottomland. Lorraine didn’t say much back, but she stayed awake. She didn’t take her nap at two-fifteen like she usually did when the physical therapist came in to move her ankles.
I sat in the corner by the window with my ledger book where I kept track of her Medicare bills and the pharmacy receipts from Kroger, and I watched the way he handed her the cup of ice chips. He didn’t crowd her. He held the paper cup at the exact angle where she could reach the straw without turning her neck.
“You talk too much for a reader,” she told him that third week.
“I learned it from people who didn’t,” he said.
I didn’t think much of it then. You meet all kinds when someone is sliding down the hill. People come out of the woodwork to bring casseroles you can’t eat or tell you about their own mother’s liver failure while you are trying to fill out a death benefit form. I figured Marcus was just one of those retired guys from the First Methodist who got assigned to the hospice circuit because his wife died or his kids moved off to Memphis.
The fourth Thursday was the day the nurse told us to start turning her every two hours.
The room smelled sour, like old linoleum and the rubbing alcohol they used on her back to keep the skin from breaking. I had my coat on because the heater in the wall had stuck on cold, and I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell Dwight we needed to sell the back lot behind Lorraine’s house just to cover the final three weeks at Cedar Vale.
Marcus came through the door at two minutes past two. He wasn’t carrying the bird book.
Instead, tucked right under his left arm like a sack of feed, he had an old Stride Rite shoebox. The cardboard was soft at the corners where greasy thumbs had held it for forty years, and it was tied around the middle with a length of faded tan baling twine that had been knotted twice.
He didn’t sit down right away. He stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at Lorraine’s feet under the blanket.
Lorraine opened her eyes. She didn’t look tired. She looked like she had just remembered she left the stove burner on back in 1968.
“You look like you’re fixing to tell me something I won’t like,” she said.
Marcus let out a short breath that sounded like a laugh, but his lower lip twitched once near the corner. He set the shoebox down on the grey laminate tray table right over her knees, where the plastic was scarred by twenty years of hospital forks.
He looked over at me in the corner. “Are you family, Miss?”
“I’m her niece Diane,” I said, standing up so fast my knee caught the corner of the vinyl chair. “If this is about some church donation or something she signed before she got fuzzy, she hasn’t had her wits about her since the first of the month.”
Marcus didn’t take his eyes off the box. “She had her wits about her just fine back when I was eight years old.”
He untied the knot in the twine. He didn’t rip it; he used his thumbnail to work the loop loose the way my daddy used to undo a hay bale before tossing it down to the steers.
Inside the box were letters. Not two or three, but a whole stack held together with rubber bands that had rotted into yellow crusts. The paper was that cheap, thin tablet paper from the five-and-dime, folded into thirds and stuffed into envelopes with no return addresses, just grease-pencil numbers written in the top right corner.
I knew that handwriting before I even took a step closer.
It was Lorraine’s hand. Round Ls that leaned to the right like they were fighting a wind, and little tiny circles instead of dots over every i because she said the sharp points looked angry.
I had never seen those letters in my life.
Lorraine never wrote to anybody except the county tax assessor and the Sears catalog office. We thought she didn’t have enough feeling in her to write a letter to the governor, let alone a whole box of them that smelled like mothballs and cellar damp.
Marcus lifted the top envelope out of the pile. He didn’t pull the letter all the way out. He just showed the corner where a postmark from the Jackson main station was stamped in purple ink that had faded to the color of an old bruise.
“1981,” he said. His voice was lower than usual, almost down in his chest where the words didn’t want to come loose. “I was living in that brick tenement behind the railroad depot over on Pearl Street. My daddy was gone off to Shreveport with a woman who worked the ticket counter, and my mother spent our grocery money before the first of the month on things that didn’t come in bottles from the pharmacy.”
Aunt Lorraine didn’t move her head. She just stared at the cardboard box like it was something she had dropped down a well forty years ago and finally heard hit the water.
“You sent eighteen dollars every month for three years,” Marcus said. He looked right at her eyes, not the box. “Then twenty-five when the books went up. You signed them all from ‘A Friend in Lee County.’ But I found the receipt stubs in the bottom of the ledger when the church archive in Jackson finally let me look at the old box files last winter.”
The room got very quiet. Down the hall, someone was dropping metal kidney basins into a stainless steel sink, and the sound carried through the hollow core door like a hammer on an anvil.
I stood there with my Kroger receipts in my hand, feeling small in a way I hadn’t felt since I was twelve and caught taking nickels from the milk money jar on the back porch.
“I thought you were just mean,” I whispered.
Marcus looked at me then, and his eyes weren’t angry. They were just heavy. Like he had been carrying that shoebox across a plowed field since he was a kid and was finally setting it down where the dirt was flat.
“She wasn’t mean,” Marcus said softly. He reached out and touched the corner of the Stride Rite box with one finger. “She just didn’t have enough to waste on small talk.”
Aunt Lorraine let out a long, dry sigh that rattled the edge of her paper napkin on the tray. Her hand came out from under the quilt, slow, shaking like a dry leaf on a sycamore limb, and she laid her palm flat against the cardboard next to his thumb.
“Those shoes were twelve dollars even,” she said. Her voice was thin as greaseproof paper, but every word stayed right where she put it. “And you scuffed the toes before you even got across the tracks.”
Marcus laughed then, a real laugh that made his shoulders shake, and he didn’t wipe his eyes when the water spilled over his lashes. He pulled a small, square photograph out from under the stack of letters and laid it right in the middle of her hand, right over the blue veins and the yellow skin.
It was a picture of a boy about ten years old, standing on a patch of dead crabgrass in front of a white house with peeling paint, wearing a pair of brown oxfords that were way too big for him because his mother had bought them with room to grow.
Lorraine looked down at the boy for a long time.
Then she closed her fingers over the picture, just a little bit, like she was afraid the paper might blow away if she held it too tight.
Marcus didn’t read to her that day. He didn’t need to. He just sat on the edge of the metal chair with his knees touching the side of her mattress, and for forty minutes nobody came in to check the IV or ask about the insurance papers, and the room didn’t smell like bleach anymore. It just smelled like old paper and the way things stay behind after you’re done using them.
