I read to her when she was too tired to talk. Psalms, mostly. The twenty-third, the hundred and twenty-first. Sometimes she’d stop me partway through.
“Read that line again,” she’d say. “The one about the hills.”
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.”
“That one.” She’d close her eyes. “My mother loved that one.”
She slept more each day. When she was awake, she’d turn the pink heart around and around on her finger. Her hands had gotten so thin the ring would slide right off if she didn’t keep it bent, so Bettina wrapped a bit of white medical tape around the inside of the band, and June declared it “custom fitting.”
On the third day, Hazel came with Wes after school and climbed up into the chair beside me with a coloring book. She colored a horse purple, then studied it.
“Grandma says you’re a preacher,” she said.
