and then I sat next to her bed in the recovery room while she slept.
When she woke up, it was dark outside. She looked at me for a long time without saying anything.
“You’re still here,” she said finally.
“Susan’s flight lands at six in the morning. I told her I’d stay.”
“You have Willa.”
“Willa’s with my neighbor. She’s fine. She sent you this.”
I held up a piece of paper. Willa had drawn it that afternoon, when I called and told her what happened. It was a picture of Mrs. Whitaker’s house. All forty-two windows. And in every single window, she had drawn a little yellow light.
GET WELL SOON, it said at the top, in purple marker. THE HOUSE MISSES YOU.
Mrs. Whitaker looked at it. She didn’t say anything. Her chin trembled.
Then she turned her face toward the wall.
I sat there in the dark and held her hand, and I didn’t say anything either.
She was in the hospital for a week and a rehab center for five more. I kept going to the house every Thursday. I watered the plants. I dusted the piano. I got the mail and put it on the hall table.
Now I understood what she meant by the house needs someone in it.
I went to see her at the rehab center twice. Once with Willa. Willa brought a new drawing, a floor plan of the rehab center, all the hallways and the dining room and the physical therapy gym. The
nurses loved it. They taped it to the wall at the nurses’ station.
When Mrs. Whitaker came home in April, walking with a cane, Susan stayed with her for a month. Susan was about my age, maybe a little older. She had her mother’s straight back and her father’s
kind face.
On her last day, before she flew home, Susan found me in the kitchen. I was wiping down the counters.
“Carly,” she said. “Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“My mother isn’t a person who says things,” Susan said. “You’ve probably noticed. She was a school principal for twenty-eight years. She ran that school like a navy ship. She loved us, my dad
and me. But she never said it much. She showed it. In very, very small ways.” She looked at me. “I just want you to know. She talks about you. On the phone. Every week.”
