Chapter 3

For six days I carried those two gray slips around in the back pocket of my jeans, next to a lint-covered cough drop I’d had when I died. The board over the counter changed to June 23, and the number under my name clicked down to 43. I had filled out one of the slips, but I hadn’t turned it in.

Every afternoon I watched Kit through the viewing room window. She had cleared the lower drawers and moved on to the counter. The shallow drawer was still shut, but the space around it grew busy with bills, scissors, and a jar of screws.

On Tuesday I finally handed Halene the slip. She read it and looked at me over her glasses. “You understand the cost?” “I write the memory down and I lose it,” I said. “I know.” “What did you choose?” “Kit’s baby laugh.” I’d been rolling it around for days, checking its edges like a quarter in my pocket. “She’s thirty-eight. It’ll still be there.”

Halene didn’t argue with me. She stamped the slip and slid it into a worn metal box under the counter. “Someone will process it,” she said. “When the window opens.”

That evening, through the viewing room, I saw Kit working at the kitchen counter. A yellow sticky note from her own hand was stuck to the edge near the canister of sugar. It said call landlord, with a time she’d already missed. I didn’t know how the signal would come. Then a small draft moved through the kitchen.

It lifted the sticky note and carried it six inches, then set it down at the base of the shallow drawer.

I counted my memory while it happened. Kit’s baby laugh was gone before the note landed. I could still see it: the blue towel on the kitchen floor, Kit’s round face, her mouth wide open. But the sound was missing, like a word I could almost reach.

Kit turned from the sink. She walked to the window, which was open a crack, and shut it hard. “Great,” she said to nobody. “Now every paper in here’s going to fly.”

Then she gathered the stack of bills and school papers that had been sitting near the counter and packed them on top of the drawer pull. She pressed them flat and walked away. The shallow drawer was buried.

I sat with my hands open in my lap. I had used half of everything I could ever send, and the letter was harder to reach than before.

Kit came back two minutes later. She reached into the pile for something. Her hand stopped short of the drawer as her phone rang.