He asked me to read to him.
Not a book — the notebook, it turns out, though I didn’t know that then; he asked me to read him the newspaper, the whole thing, including the classifieds, and when I asked why the classifieds he said, “Because somebody wrote every one of those and they’re all trying to say something true in eleven words.”
Somebody wrote every one of those.
On Friday he stopped talking much.
On Saturday he held my hand with a grip that frightened me and said one full sentence, which was: “Don’t do this too long, Willa. Do it a while and then have a life.”
And on Sunday, at 6:20 in the evening, with a nurse named Cordelia at the door and me in the chair, his heart stopped.
I held his hand through every difficult breath until his heart stopped.
Afterward, I sat alone in his empty room, stunned by how much silence someone I’d known for such a short time could leave behind.
Then an elderly man walked in carrying a green backpack.
“Willa?” he asked. “I’m your husband’s attorney. My name is Mr. Sato. He left this backpack for you.”
He placed it in my hands.
I immediately noticed how heavy it was.
Far heavier than it looked.
The lawyer watched my face for a moment, then lowered his voice.
“Alden wasn’t who you thought he was,” the old man said quietly. “He wanted you to know the truth.”
I opened it in the parking garage, alone, sitting sideways in my car with the door open, because I couldn’t wait.
Inside were two things: a hardcover notebook worn soft at the corners — and underneath it, filling the entire bag, ten pounds of them, so many they poured over my hands when I tipped it — thousands of aluminum soda can pull tabs.
I sat in a parking garage with my hands full of them.
Then I opened the notebook, and the first page had a date in 1979 and a name and three words after it, and I read down the page, and every line was the same shape.
A date.
A name.
And three words.
I turned to the last written page.
The final entry was a date eleven days earlier, and a name I recognized, and the number written beside it was 1,140.
PART 2
The name on the last line was mine.
“March 14. Willa Brennan. She goes around.”
