“Please, this is serious.”
“She keeps asking for you.”
That last message was not entirely true.
Gertrude had stopped speaking before we reached the hospital, but I wanted him to imagine that his mother was still waiting for him.
I wanted something to break through his silence.
Twenty-eight calls.
Twenty-nine.
Thirty.
Every one went to voicemail.
I lowered the phone and watched the screen go dark in my hand.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I told her. “I can’t reach him.”
I had called her Mom for years.
No one had asked me to.
The word had arrived slowly, through ordinary things.
It began the first winter after Christopher and I married, when Gertrude showed up at our apartment with a slow cooker, two bags of groceries, and a handwritten recipe because she had heard I was working late shifts.
It deepened when she remembered my birthday after Christopher forgot and drove across town with a grocery-store cake sliding around on the passenger seat.
