I sat there on her floor for a long time.
There was a part of me, I’m ashamed to say, that felt jealous. That was my line. Sam’s and mine. He said it to me for twenty years. I thought it was ours. I thought it was the only thing in the world that was just ours.
And all that time, he’d been saying it to a lonely old widow across from a cemetery.
But there was another part of me, a bigger part, that felt something else. Something warm and terrible, rising up through my chest.
Because of course he did. Of course my son did that. Of course he saw a seventy-four-year-old woman alone in a house with a frozen pipe, and he went back, and back, and back again, and he never told anyone, and he brought her flowers.
That was Sam. That was exactly who he was.
“Why do you have his card?” I asked. “Why is it in there? With the date?”
Marta’s face changed. Something closed in it, like a door.
She didn’t answer.
“Marta,” I said. “Why does it say March fourteenth?”
She looked down at her hands. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet I almost couldn’t hear it.
“Because that was the last time,” she said.
Chapter Six: Hollis Avenue
I knew before she told me. I think some part of me had known since I stood on the curb and saw the street sign.
Hollis Avenue.
For seven months, one thing had bothered me about Sam’s accident. Just one small thing, like a stone in my shoe. I never said it out loud to anyone, except once to the insurance adjuster, who wrote it down and didn’t seem to think it mattered.
Sam worked for Pruitt Plumbing, on the south side of town. He lived in an apartment on Fairview, also on the south side. Every day, for eight years, he drove home the same way. Down Route 4, then Fairview, ten minutes. He never went north. Never.
