when we know better, we do better
No one came to visit after they lost all their pretty. Not even me—from arms-length across the table—they were nobody. I hadn’t left an impression, but they did: in the empty chairs of their departure.
These two women were raised in the shadow of vaudville and the speakeasy. In an era just past flapper girls and a dust bowl. Anyone to whom they were someone was long gone. They sat at Patricia’s dinner table and they died between my visits to the long-term care facility.
I watched others come and go. Bernard, Patricia’s first boyfriend at the facility, and Ruby, his wife, who thought I looked like Errol Flynn. She mistook me for Mr Postee, a constable of distant memory. It seems frisky pre-war Ruby had a fling, to the amusement of their daughter Gillian, over again from England.
There was a departure with dignity ceremony for Bernard. He sat in the corner, in a box, under a candle. Bernard would have been lit for the wake, anyway. Ruby was still wandering the halls after Patricia parted.
After that, the death of the two women I overlooked came into focus. I wonder how much I missed beyond my borders. What I missed in the library that burns when an old woman dies. Two libraries. Rose and Jean, long may you live in memory—and narrative.
