The Fare That Cost Her Daughter's Solo

"That isn't my handwriting," I told the clerk as my daughter emptied the wrong drawer beneath our viewing window.
The file in my hands said "Tell Kit why you missed her solo" in neat blue pen under the word UNFINISHED.
I'd been dead for four hours, and the sealed letter I'd left her was one drawer up from the junk drawer she was pulling apart.
My ticket number was still stuck to my palm: 49.
I'd expected the unfinished line to say my house.
My heart had quit a little before six that morning, just as the cardiologist warned in May, and I'd spent the rest of that month hiding a letter while Kit's deadlines filled the kitchen calendar.
July 31 was circled in red on the refrigerator, under the word PHOTOS.
Kit had written it the week the cardiologist gave us the news. She called it being practical.
It was the day a photographer would shoot the house for a sale listing, and she meant to have every cabinet and drawer emptied first.
Now she was working through the lower cabinets like she was trying to beat it.
The hall had given me forty-nine days to finish what I'd left undone, and if I was still standing here when they ran out, I would start to fade and lose the door.
Kit had forty-four days before the photographer came, and she was treating that as the only deadline.
"Mrs. Pike." The clerk had short white hair and reading glasses on a chain, and she kept one finger on the counter as if the file might slide. "I filled that line from your intake words."
"I paid a stranger's bus fare," I said. "I was short for my own ride, so I missed Kit's concert. Then I told her I'd been called in to work. That's the whole account."
"Yes," the clerk said. "That is what the line asks you to finish."
Through the window, Kit shook the junk drawer, and a shower of dried pens and dead batteries slid into the sink.
She didn't look up at the shallow drawer above it.
The letter was there, sealed, with her name on the front. I had put it there in May because I was afraid to hand it to her and couldn't stand to throw it away.
I could still feel the flap under my thumb, where I had pressed it down twice and then left it for her.
"It's not the whole thing," I told the clerk. "It makes it sound like I had something to say that could fix it."
"Don't you?"
"I have a reason. Kit's allowed to decide if it matters."
Halene-I finally looked at her nameplate-Halene Goff watched me a moment too long. Then she turned the file toward me and pointed at the bottom of the page.
Below the blue line, in the same neat hand, she had written May 20, 1997, the date of Kit's solo.