Free The Last Odd Day by Lynne Hinton

meaningful final words or astounding moment of clarity like I have heard others speak of when they tell their dead one’s story. Unlike even my mother, who died as she had lived, in sadness, or myfather, who died begging for death to come, O.T. didn’t suddenly turn to me and call out my name or tighten his grip or smile or shed a tear. He simply eased into it, accepted it, welcomed it like a man who had been waiting for his lover finally to come.
    The warmth drained from his hand and the lines around his eyes and brow melted. His lips fell; and his breathing slowed and finally stopped. It was not desired or wrestled with, it was simply his time, and he acquiesced. Not a burden or an escape, it was merely death.
    I clasped his hand tightly, pausing like the ancestors until the chorus was over; then I reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, straightened the sheets around him, and waited for someone to find us.
    After almost half an hour, it was the housekeeper who came and bowed beside me, said a prayer delivering my husband into somebody else’s hands, and quietly and quickly left us once again to be alone. Soon, once the news was told, a few of the nurses came, the administrator, and a chaplain; but none of them, just like O.T., had very much to say.
    When I was asked by Mrs. Fredericks, the director of Sunhaven, about relatives to contact, I said politely and confidently that I would call his two brothers, Dick and Jolly, from home. She leaned toward me, placed her hand on my shoulder, and gave me a sympathetic squeeze. Ireturned to his room to wait for the funeral home personnel, and that’s when a nursing assistant, one I had not known or noticed, tiptoed into the room and handed me a little piece of paper, torn from a notebook, with a name and number of someone, she said, who would want to know.

9
    I met her in the parking lot while the hearse was pulling away. Sunhaven was more than an hour and a half from where she lived, but she arrived before I had finished filling out the forms and packing up O.T.’s things.
    She got out of her car, crossed herself like I had seen the Catholics do, and walked in my direction, slowly and easily, like she was worried that she was moving too fast. But in only the second it took to see her approach, her gait, her frame, so clearly her father’s child, I remember thinking, rationally and calmly, Everything now is different.
    Just as she came near me, the wind whipping her scarf from around her neck, a ribbon of pink flying past, my stomach knotted, my head spun, and I began to feeldizzy. I reached out to steady myself, searching for the railing that I thought was behind me or the bench I remembered being near the door; and she caught me just as I started to fall.
    â€œJean,” she said and lowered me to the steps while I responded with a low and gentle hum.
    A nurse hurried out and the two of them walked me to the family room. I drank sips of cola and kept a cool cloth across my brow. I ate a few crackers and said I wanted to go home. She stood near the door and watched.
    The nursing home director put me in the passenger’s side of her gold and white sedan and drove me to my house. I kept my eyes closed the entire way. It would be two days before I saw her again, before we finally spoke.
    Lilly Maria Lucetti was born June 2, 1960, in Durham General Hospital, out in the hallway because she would not wait to come. She was a late spring baby. She is dark complexioned, olive-skinned, like a woman from Italy or France or somewhere on the Mediterranean.
    She lived with her mother and her grandparents until she was ten. Then her mother, who never married, and Lilly moved out to a little house farther in the woods and just down the road from her parents. There was a lot of love and laughter, the days more sweet than sorry; and she considers her early years to have been serene.
    She has large, oval eyes, like a delighted child; and she’s as skinny as