Chapter 4

By June thirtieth the board above the counter read 36, and the kitchen looked less like the house I'd kept.

The viewing room ran on a schedule I was still learning. It opened at nine for the morning block, closed at ten sharp, and stayed locked until noon.

I took the chair nearest the glass at nine.

Kit had pulled a box labeled SCHOOL onto the table and was working through it, spelling tests first, then a construction-paper crown with half its glitter gone.

She folded the crown flat, put it on the donate stack, and took it back off again.

The funeral had been Saturday, June twentieth, three days after I died.

Kit held it at a funeral home across town, and the window wouldn't show me that.

It only showed me the house afterward.

Eleven people came back to the kitchen: two neighbors, my old foreman from the upholstery shop, three women from the transit center volunteer room, and Kit's supervisor from dispatch, carrying a tray of ham sandwiches.

They told Kit I'd gone quickly.

I had. My heart quit a little before six on the morning of the seventeenth, in the chair beside my bed, the way the cardiologist said it might.

Kit said thank you eleven times that afternoon. I counted.

Then she washed every plate herself and wouldn't let the neighbor dry.

I knew that trick. I'd used it my whole life and called it being useful.

At nine thirty her phone rang on the counter.

She put it on speaker, and I heard the voice on the other end for the first time, thin and patient and tired. It was the property manager from her building.

"I know what I owe," Kit said. "Eighteen-sixty. I get paid Friday, but I can't cover all of it."

The voice said something I couldn't hear.

Kit stood with her palm flat on the counter.

"Probate doesn't run on rent day," she said. "I can't list the house until the kitchen is empty. That's the only way."

The voice answered again, shorter this time.

"I heard you the first time," Kit said, and then, quieter, "I'm sorry. I heard you."

She ended the call and stood with the phone against her collarbone, breathing through her nose.

Then she picked up the packing tape and went back to work.

I'd been the one to fall behind once, in the year after my hip went bad.

I'd hidden it from Kit for months.

Hearing her defend the same number made my throat tight, but I couldn't say I was sorry.

At ten the lights over the viewing window dimmed and the console clicked to LOCKED.

I found Halene at the counter and asked for the two hours between ten and noon.

She shook her head.

"Mrs. Pike, the window isn't a right. There are people who died this morning."

"I know that."

"Then let them have their hour."

I did.

I let them have it.

I sat in the gray chairs for two hours and watched strangers go up to the glass, each of them leaning in like it was cold water.

At noon the room opened again, and Kit was still at the table with the school box open.

She lifted out a first-grade report card, and a snapshot slid from between its pages and landed faceup on the table.

A gravel alley behind our old house. A small red bike on its side. Kit at six, glaring at the camera, one knee torn out of her jeans.

At the edge of the frame was my own hand, still holding the seat.

I remembered the rest the way you remember your own phone number.

The clack of the chain. Hot gravel through the soles of my shoes.

My palm letting go at the third garage without telling her.

Kit yelling back over her shoulder, "You let go! You let go!" and not falling.

She laughed once, short and surprised, like someone had stepped on her foot.

Then she stood the snapshot against the sugar canister and kept digging.

Near the bottom she lifted out a folded yellow program.

May 20, 1997, Spring Concert.

Kit Pike, Vocal Solo.

She already knew the date.

She smoothed the program on the counter and ran her thumb under her own name.

Then she carried it to the sink.

For a second I thought she would throw it away.

Instead she came back and stood with it, her thumb still under her own name.

The shallow drawer was still sealed under the stack of papers.

I should have kept that program somewhere else.

I'd kept it in the school box for twenty-nine years, next to her report cards, and I'd never once used it to tell her the truth.

A program could prove the date. It couldn't tell her why.

She set the program on the counter beside the still-sealed shallow drawer.