Page 6

I get out and work the deadbolt with the key I've carried since I was sixteen.

Inside it smells like closed rooms and old carpet glue. The terrazzo holds the cool it's held since 1962. The air is warmer than she ever kept it, the thermostat set just low enough to keep the closets dry and the mold off the walls. Down the hall, the jalousies in the Florida room lay hash marks across the floor.

Mail's stacked square on the dining table where Rudy leaves it. Three grocery bags on the counter beside it, exactly the list I sent him last week. He turned the water heater back up, and there's nothing leaking under the sink.

He got the tree, too. It stands in the front room, six feet of it, lights already burning and water in the stand and damn near every ornament she owns hanging off it. Rudy follows instructions like scripture.

One ornament sits on the coffee table next to the empty box. No wonder he left it out. It doesn't look like an ornament. It looks like something that got mixed in.

I pick it up. The clothespin body, doily skirt gone the color of weak tea, and one wing bent so long it's set that way is sad if it didn’t have meaning. On the back, in her handwriting, CARSON NORTH, GRADE 3.

I was eight that Christmas. It was the first one I spent in this house. My father had already gone, and my mother went after him a few months later. Hildie told me I could stay with her until things got sorted out.

They never did. She kept me anyway, and kept the ugly damn angel, too.

I hang it near the top on the side that faces her chair where she hangs it every year. Rudy did better with the rest of the tree than I would have, which I knew when I called him.

I check the time, lock the house behind me, and drive back for her.

The clipboard at the front desk is the same clipboard, and the pen on the chain still won't write on the first stroke. I scribble a circle in the corner to get the ink moving, then sign my name and the time. 4:18.

Manny comes around the desk with his hand already out. His grip is dry and firm.

"Good to see you, Carson. Sorry I missed you earlier. I was on my break when you came through." His eyebrows go up a hair before he catches them. "I figured you'd make it in for Christmas, but I wasn’t sure when."

Calling the desk myself would have taken thirty seconds. I gave the job to her because passing along a message is a job she can still do, and now I've got no way of knowing whether she did it.

We start down the hall together, and he sets a pace I'd call slow on anybody else. He walks like a man leading a green colt past a tarp. He’s a little man, with short legs and stride. I fall in and match him.

Neither of us fills the gap. Our shoes on the waxed floor are the only sound for ten steps.

"She's had a good day," he says. “She’s been in the day room most of the morning, and she had company this afternoon."

"Glad to hear it."

He nods at a door as we pass it. "She's quit asking about the mail." He lets that sit a second. "Still plays bridge with Lis Larkin and a lady down the hall. That woman can play some cards. Good day or bad day, she'll take every one of us."

That gets a smile out of me. Seven months in here and this thing has taken so much away from her and left the strangest pieces sitting right where they were.

"How long are you in for?"

"I fly out on the twenty-sixth. She'll stay at the house with me while I'm here, and we'll come back and forth to the center during the day so it doesn't get too off of her schedule. That's what the social worker suggested."

"That's the right call. Routine's the wall holding the water back." He stops walking. "Christmas isn't a reason to knock a hole in it."

I stop with him. There's a wreath on the nurses' station in pink and green with a polka dot bow gone crooked.

"What else can I do?"

"Nothing, really. Keep calling her. She lights up on your call days."

That word goes into me like a nail. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day I fix things. Fence, water, engines, animals that have decided to die on me. There is not one item on the list for the only person who ever looked at me and decided I was worth keeping.

"You're a good nephew," Manny says. "Showing up is the work. That's all of it."

He points me down the hall toward her door and turns back for the desk. I know where her door is. I thank him anyway and walk the rest of it by myself.

The room is empty when I come through it. The bed is made tight the way the aides do it, and her light blue cardigan is folded over the foot of it. Her recliner and the little sofa aim at the flat-screen on the wall. Everything in here works. Nothing in here needs me.