Last Year

 

We look through your pocket calendar, starting

at the back, birthdays, phone numbers, accounts,

medications, dosages, refill information. “He

never started another,” she tells me. We flip to

December, the family Christmas on the twenty-

ninth, an iron shot, rehab three days a week,

her seventieth two days before you died, and

the appointment you kept that last Monday.

 

“He knew,” she says. Sunday night you told her you

thought you might be admitted the next day; you felt

that bad. Thanksgiving and the half of us who made it

penciled in. September and a soccer game. I had to walk

you to and from the car. August and a trip to the lake.

July and a badminton tournament in the yard, getting

the kids out of the house so you could nap. June, May,

April, March and February, every week another set of

doctor, lunch, and dinner dates, people up to visit.

 

When did you decide? One day in the pharmacy when

you stood by those little leather volumes, the new

year stamping across them in gold? Did you linger or

hurry past? Did you glance up at the sunlight skating

across the windowglass, a strange woman on the

sidewalk, tightening her scarf around her open throat?

 

Did you step outside, head home, the medicine forgotten,

and the road familiar as the backs of the vivid dreams that

woke you every morning before daybreak when you’d

lie on your half of the bed and watch morning reinvent

itself, marching its fingertips of light over the hills,

like a mother distracting her little boy with play?