“Marguerite S. asked me tonight to take something so I would not forget her. There was nothing in the room. A can on the tray. I took the tab off it and put it in my pocket and told her I would keep it, and she said, that’s a ring, you know, and laughed. First laugh out of her in nine days.
So: a tab from every room. That’s the system. She invented it.
If I ever get old and there’s a bag of these, somebody’s going to think I was crazy. Fine. Marguerite thought it was funny.”
Marguerite S.
1983.
Eleven hundred and thirty-eight rooms later, a man in a hospital bed put one on my finger and called it a wedding ring, and I had no idea I was wearing the entire architecture of his life.
PART 3
I went back to Mr. Sato.
He is seventy-eight, he has practiced law for fifty-one years, and he had been Alden’s attorney since 1991, and when I sat down in his office with the notebook he did something I did not expect.
He took off his glasses and said, “May I see the last page? He wouldn’t tell me the number.”
I showed him.
“One thousand one hundred and forty,” Mr. Sato said, and put his glasses back on, and was quiet.
“You knew about this.”
“I knew about the notebook. I did not know it was that many.” He folded his hands. “Mrs. Voss—”
“Willa.”
“Willa. I want to answer the question you came here with, which is why he married you, and I want to answer it accurately, because I think you have been telling yourself two versions and neither is right.”
“Which two?”
“That he did it because he was lonely and you were kind. And that he did it because he wanted somebody to inherit that bag.” Mr. Sato shook his head. “Neither. Alden Voss was not lonely in the way you mean and he did not care what happened to the tabs. He told me what he wanted in 2019 and he told it to me twice more since, and he was extremely specific, and I’m going to read you the instruction because he wrote it out.”
He opened a file.
“‘When I go, I want it to be a person and not a volunteer. Sato, listen to me: I have sat in eleven hundred rooms and every one of those people had a stranger at the end and I was the stranger and it was not enough. It’s better than nothing. It is not enough. What they wanted was somebody who was theirs. So if there’s a way — if some person is willing — I would like the last hand to belong to somebody with a legal document that says she’s mine. Not because it means anything to the state. Because I have spent forty-six years watching people d*e as somebody’s stranger and I would like to go as somebody’s husband. That’s the whole ask. Don’t make it complicated.'”
