Free All Rivers Flow to the Sea by Alison McGhee

of walking well, of not thinking about walking, are long behind her. Now her every step is fraught. Her every step is something she thinks about, even now, in May, when winter is a memory.
    Is that a puddle?
    Is that a curb?
    Mustn’t fall. Mustn’t fall. Mustn’t fall.
    Are those the thoughts of the old lady? Is that her mantra? I look at her and imagine that she’s only trying to get back across the street into the Olbiston apartment building. Maybe she has a cat, a cat lying in a blue velvet chair, waiting for the old lady who has to think about Every, Single, Step.
    But she doesn’t fall. She makes her way slowly and steadily across the street. I cheer her on from my seat in William T.’s truck.
    Then the bag splits. The old lady’s cans and boxes roll around on the sidewalk, off the curb, into a puddle.
    I shove open William T.’s truck door and run.
Quick, Rose, pick up all the groceries and set them beside the old lady.
She stands there trembling.
    “Wait! I’ll be right back!”
    I hold my hand up. “Two minutes! Wait!”
    Then I run into the A&P and grab a couple of plastic bags from the cashier and run back out. She’s still standing there. Trembling. I crouch at her feet. She’s wearing stockings. Old ladies always wear stockings. She’s wearing old lady black rubber boots with fur at the top even though it’s May, and gloves, and a hat, and an old lady black coat because old ladies are always cold.
    I put all the groceries — the cans and boxes and bottles, the lamb chop and the two long carrots and the one onion and the head of lettuce — into the plastic bag. Then I put that bag inside the other bag.
    “There you go.”
    “Thank you.”
    She doesn’t look at me. She’s too far gone into what just happened.
    “Can I help you across the street?”
    “Thank you.”
    But she can barely move. Her mouth is trembling. Her eyes are moving around, casting about on the sidewalk.
    “Let me help you.”
    But I can’t. That’s the worst thing. I can’t really help the old lady. I can run around and pick up all her groceries and put them in a plastic bag and take her arm and guide her across the street and raise my fist at a car that’s going too fast and splashes us both with dirty brown water. I can walk her slowly, slowly, slowly, up the ramp into the brick building. I can hold the door for her, breathe in the stuffy indoor old-apartment-cooking-food-knocking-radiator smell of the building. But I can’t help her the way I want to help her. I can’t bring her back her legs. I can’t bring her back her youth. I can’t bring her back to a time in her life when someone stood beside her laughing and holding her hand.
    “Thank you,” she says.
    “Anytime!” I say in a cheerleader voice. “No problem!”
    William T. waits in the truck, watching me cross the street from the old lady’s apartment building.
    “What was that about?” he says.
    I shake my head. Inside me I’m all exclamation marks, small streaks of lightning stabbing.
    “She all right?” William T. says, looking across the street to where the old lady disappeared into the building.
    I shake my head.
    “Are you all right?”
    I shake my head.
    William T. puts the truck in gear and pulls out of the A&P parking lot. He points us north, to where the foothills are rising up, and eases into traffic.
    “Home?” he asks after a while. After about fifteen minutes. Another fifteen minutes, and we will be at my driveway.
    I shake my head.
    “You want to go to skip stones at the Sterns Gorge, then?” he says. “We could have a contest, like we used to way back when.”
    “No!”
    I can feel him looking at me.
Stop looking at me, William T.
    “That was a pretty big no,” he says after a while. “Any particular reason for that?”
    “No!”
    “Younger.”
    “No! No! No!”
    Exclamation points, jabbing and stabbing inside me. I sit in the truck and rock. Rock. Rock. Try to rock the water inside me, loosen it from its still lakes