Free Lost by Gary; Devon Page B

in the mail. I’ve got the note here somewhere.” She flipped through a file and held up a small sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook. Written in a gawky, childish hand, the note said: PLEASE SEND 1 ROSE EVERY DAY TO MAMIE ABBOTT TIL MONEY GONE . IL NO IF YOU DONT . That was all. No signature or date or other markings. “Don’t that take the cake?” the woman said, her hands again shaping the wreath. “So we did what it said. Oh, I remember now—it didn’t come in the mail. Somebody stuck it under the door along with a ten-dollar bill.”
    â€œIs that so?” Leona said, just to keep her talking.
    â€œWe think it must’ve been some kid, one of her friends at school, or maybe—you know, by the handwriting. The envelope was all beat up.” The woman went on and on, even to the point of recalling the multiple Abbott funeral. Leona was obliged to listen to her politely until another customer came in some fifteen minutes later. The woman’s notions seemed logical enough, and without an alternative theory of her own, Leona laid the small mystery to rest in the back of her mind.
    Now suppers at Emma’s seemed even more subdued than usual, a soft tinkling of dinnerware and china, followed by the news on the Emerson television set Emma’s husband, Frank, had just acquired. When Emma had settled into her pink chair, busy with her crochet hook, Leona slipped quietly out the kitchen door and walked (or, if it was getting dark, drove) the twelve blocks and up the hill through the humidity of the evening to the hospital.
    Tuesday was rain, and Wednesday was ten quarts of Rutgers tomatoes, and then it was Friday and Emma was hurrying to meet Frank after work to go to the V.F.W. for a blue-plate special and a few rounds of bingo. Knowing what the answer would be, Emma no longer asked Leona to join them. Leona spent the afternoon shopping and arrived at the hospital early.
    Church-still, they sat side by side next to the bed, a man in a blue gabardine suit so new it still held the hanger creases, and a woman in a faded print dress, their weathered faces rotated toward her as she entered the room. She could have stumbled in her surprise. One look at their gaunt, sunburned faces and she knew who they were and why they were here. She went to stand across from them on the other side of the bed, and she said, “You must be Mamie’s relatives?”
    They nodded that they were. She asked where they were from. “Redland, Texas,” the woman said. She asked how their trip had been. “Long and tedious,” the woman replied. The man’s gnarled hands rested like carvings on his knees and the woman’s thin bony fingers clutched the black purse in her lap. Mamie had not moved on the bed, her expression slack and remote. “Does she recognize you?” Leona asked, and they shook their heads. To make conversation, Leona said, “I was wondering—how old is she?” The woman frowned. “Seems like the first or second grade, wasn’t it, Charles?” Taking his time, the man nodded.
    The withered roses had been thrown out, but ten tube vases still occupied the windowsill. “Mamie had such pretty roses,” Leona said. “Did you send them?”
    â€œNo,” the woman said. “We meant to, but with the funerals, we just couldn’t.”
    After a while, Leona asked them if they were related to Mr. or Mrs. Abbott and the woman said, “Ray was my sister’s boy.” That would make them Mamie’s great-aunt and great-uncle on her father’s side. For what it was worth.
    Unmistakably they were as slow as they appeared—slow, slow-speaking dirt farmers from Redland, Texas, come to take Mamie away. The evening light eroded into red and purple streaks and the long silences loomed between them. Finally, although Leona had made up her mind not to tell them who she was unless they asked, she blurted out that