Chapter 6

I got there first. Barely.

The lid came off in my hand. Inside: a spiral notebook with a cardboard cover, a rubber band around a stack of paper slips, and one sealed envelope with REID written on it in pencil, in handwriting I'd have known anywhere.

I opened the notebook on the tablecloth.

The pages were ruled and numbered, and every line was in my grandmother's hand.

Jan 12 - no one came. Feb 3 - no one came. Feb 9 - no one came. Mar 2 - Tessa, 12 hrs. $650. Signed, L. Ashby.

Fourteen months of nights, one line at a time. What she'd eaten. What she'd said. Which nights Tessa read to her out loud because the television hurt her eyes. And running down the right-hand margin of every page, in the same steady hand, a second column, headed: BILLED.

The rubber-banded slips were the agency's invoice stubs, carbon-copied, dated, itemized. Night nursing, twelve hours, four hundred and forty dollars a visit. Every week from January 12 on. Sixty-one visits.

Not one of them had happened.

Harlan Pike arrived at eleven-thirty, because Margot had called him at seven that morning to handle the situation.

He read the notebook standing up on the terrace with his glasses on, and then he read it out loud - all of it - in a flat attorney's voice, to my aunt and my uncle and the caterers and the woman who was supposed to have married me at four o'clock. He read the line about the checks. He read the column headed BILLED. He read the page at the back.

I am of sound mind. Everything in this book is in my hand. If anyone tells you Tessa Nolan took from me, they are lying, and I am sorry for what it costs to say so.

Margot stood at the edge of the tent with her arms folded and never once looked at the notebook. When Harlan finished, she said one thing.

"You have no idea what I've carried in this house."

Then she walked up the terrace steps into Bellhaven and closed the door behind her. Her car left at eleven-fifty.

Harlan stayed. He told me he'd have to notify the bank and the county, and that the state's elder-exploitation unit would be calling Margot on Monday, not Tessa. He said the trust Lila executed in November named me trustee and removed Margot as administrator of anything. He said it without pleasure. He'd been Lila's attorney for thirty years, and he looked like a man taking out a splinter.

I didn't open my envelope in front of anybody. That was the only thing I did right all day.

"I carried your suitcase down those steps," I said.

"You did."

"I'm sorry."

"I know." Tessa looked at the tin. "You pressed play. That's what I asked for."

At four o'clock the caterer moved the chairs back under the tent, because the chairs were already there and so was everybody, and my bride came down the west lawn in a wrinkled ivory dress and mud-caked boots, because there was no time to change either one, and the whole lawn stood up.

We were married at 4:20. Toby held the ring in both hands like a small animal.

That night I opened the envelope. One line, in pencil. Believe her. That's all.

Tessa cut the hospital bracelet off her wrist with a pair of snips and dropped it in the blue tin. I closed the lid. She put it back on the top shelf of the linen closet, behind the towels, where it had been since March.

It's still up there. The tin, the notebook, the bracelet. The whole last year of my grandmother's life, in her own hand, in a cookie tin behind the towels, waiting the way she waited - for somebody to finally ask.