I looked at my suitcase. I looked at my son. I looked at the wall where Roland’s photograph still hung, the one from 1989, where he was laughing at something just out of frame. Derek, I said very quietly. Did you check whose name is on that ticket? He blinked just once, but I saw it. I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said.
I smiled. It was the calmst smile I had ever produced in my life, which surprised me because inside I was shaking. ‘Of course you don’t,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’ Then I picked up my suitcase, walked past them both, and sat down on Roland’s porch, and called my neighbor Dorothy, and thought very carefully about what I was going to do next.
Dorothy arrived within 15 minutes, still in her gardening gloves, which told me she had not stopped to take them off before walking over, which told me everything I needed to know about Dorothy Haynes. She sat down beside me on the porch steps without asking questions, which was another thing I loved about her.
She had been my neighbor for 26 years. She had held my hand at Roland’s funeral. She understood that sometimes the first thing a person needs is simply another person sitting close enough to be felt. We sat like that for a moment in the early morning cold while somewhere behind the front door I could hear Cynthia’s voice moving through the kitchen rearranging things already.
Margaret Dorothy said finally tell me. So I told her, ‘Not all of it, not yet. Because I was still assembling it myself. The way you piece together the damage after a storm, walking the yard slowly to see what the wind has taken. I told her about the ticket, about the suitcase, about Derek’s face when I had asked him whose name was on it.
Dorothy listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘Did you write your name on that ticket?’ That was the question. I thought back to Thursday, to Garfield’s pharmacy, to Mrs. Garfield handing me the envelope across the counter with the cheerful efficiency of a woman who has done the same thing a thousand times to coming home, setting the ticket on the counter, going to get my tea.