Buffalo

The call came on the ninth of December at four in the afternoon, to the house line in the front hall, and Bea Truitt came and found me in the schoolroom with a piece of chalk in my hand.

“It is your aunt’s daughter,” she said. “She wants you.”

It was Kate. I had not heard her voice in ten years and I knew it in one word. She did not say hello.

“Vera had a stroke on Tuesday,” she said. “She is in the hospital in Buffalo and they have her in the unit with the monitors. They have told us a week, maybe two. She has been asking for you, which is not a thing any of us expected to hear.”

“Is she awake.”

“She is awake. She is mostly awake. Are you coming or not.”

“I am coming.”

“Bring your own money,” she said, and hung up.

He was in Buffalo and came back the next morning, and I told him at the door with my bag in the hall. Bea had put the keys to the gray car in my hand and a paper bag of food on the passenger seat.

“Take two weeks,” he said. “Take the car. Do not put anything on a credit card.” At the door he said, “If she asks you for something, decide before you go in.”

The drive is two hours east if the weather lets you, and it did not let me. It snowed from Victor to the county line and stopped around the Hamburg exit, and then the sky came down over the steel plant, and there was Lackawanna, a town built around a mill and waiting for the mill to come back since about 1983.

The hospital was on the West Side. Dora was in the lobby.

Dora Pell was twenty-four and looked thirty and wore a coat that cost more than my whole year, because she had married a man of fifty-one who owned car dealerships, and the coat said it before she did. She kissed the air beside my cheek.

“You came,” she said. “I did not think you would come.”

“She asked for me.”

“She asks for everybody now,” Dora said. “She asked for the priest, and then she asked for you.”

Kate was in the corridor by the vending machines with a Bible she kept a rubber band around the way other people keep a wallet, and she was talking to a chaplain.

“Our mother has not been right with God since our father died,” she said. “If she dies in this state, that is between her and the Lord, and I will not lie to a dying woman to make a corridor quieter.”

I asked where Bram was. Kate looked at me the way she had looked at me on Ridge Lane when I was nine.

“Nobody has seen Bram since the spring,” she said. “He has been in and out of the county, and there is a woman in Cheektowaga who has his truck, and that is the entire report. Do not ask about him in front of Dora.”

Vera had a room to herself at the end of the corridor.

She was small in the bed. That took a second to get used to, because in my memory she filled doorways. There were tubes in the back of her hand and one in her nose, and her hair had been done by somebody that week. Her eyes came around to the door and stayed on me while I crossed the room and sat down.

“You,” she said.

“Me.”

“You are fat.”

“I am twenty,” I said. “I will grow into it.”

That got something out of her, not a laugh—a sound like a chair leg on a floor. Her hand came up off the blanket about two inches and stayed there. I looked at it and did not take it, and after a while she put it back down.

She talked for eleven minutes. I know the number because I looked at the clock over the door twice and did the subtraction. She talked about the parish, and about a woman who had taken her old job in the church office and made a mess of the envelopes. Then she stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at the ceiling and said it.

“Your uncle Jack wrote here.”

I did not move.

“Jack Amory. Your father’s uncle. He wrote to this house the once, after you were sent away, and he wanted to know where you were.” She took a breath. “I wrote him back the once and told him nothing, and there was never another one, and I have never known whether that was my doing. He died in February. It was in the paper.”

“Where are the letters.”

“In the drawer,” she said. “With the rest of it.”

“Which drawer.”

She turned her head and looked at me, and she was still in there, the woman who had stood at the top of the stairs with a hook in her hand, and she knew exactly which drawer and that I knew.

“Say you loved me,” she said.

“What.”

“I fed you for three years. Say you loved me.”

I have gone over this part more than any other part of my life, because I have never been able to make it come out clean. If I had said the three words she would have died easier. If I had said them I would have been lying, in a hospital room, in front of a nurse, which is where she had always wanted me to be lying.

“No,” I said.

“I took you in.”

“You took me in because the county sent me to you,” I said. “And you fed me, and I will say that, and I have said it. I went to bed hungry six times in three years, and after Marcie started putting food in my coat it was four. I will not say the other thing, because I do not have it to give, and you have known that since I was nine.”

She turned her face to the window and said, “You were always a hard little thing.”

“Yes,” I said.

At six the nurse came in and said to let her sleep. At the door I turned around and said, “The drawer with the receipts,” and Vera did not open her eyes, and the corner of her mouth moved, and I think she moved it on purpose.

She died on the twelfth at ten past four in the morning. I was not in the room. I was in the hall with a paper cup of coffee, and the nurse came out and told me before she told Kate, which I have never understood and have never forgotten.

The wake was at a funeral home on Abbott Road and I stood in the line two hours, and one of the people in it said, “Your aunt was a strong woman,” and I said she was.

When it was over I went out the side door into the parking lot. It had snowed and then rained and then frozen, and there was a puddle by the door with a cigarette filter in it. I stood by the car with the program in my hand and did not get in.

I want to be exact, because there is no drama in it. I stood there forty minutes. I was not weeping. There was nothing to say and nobody to say it to. I let the cold come up through my shoes, and the reason I did not get in is that I had nowhere to go next.

Kate gave me twenty minutes in the house, because she wanted to be seen as fair.

I went in through the back and stood in the kitchen and looked at the drawer that did not open all the way. It was all still there. The grocery receipts were bundled by year with rubber bands, the church envelopes were in a shoebox, the pink pharmacy slips had their own envelope, and against the back of the drawer was a white business envelope with a Florida return address and my name typed on the outside, gone soft at the corners the way paper does when it has been handled a great many times.

Inside was one sheet in a fountain pen with a nib that was going. It said, Dear Mrs. Pell, I am looking for my nephew’s daughter Ruth. I am told you have her. I would like to know how she is and whether she needs anything. I have no children. Yours, Jack Amory. There was an address in Sarasota under it and a phone number with an area code I had to look up later.

I folded it and put it in the inside pocket of my coat and took nothing else out of that house. In the front hall I looked at the plate of holy cards, because there were more names on it now, and I shut the door behind me.

I drove back east in the dark with the smell of the lake on my left after Batavia. At the rest stop I pulled in and folded the funeral program in four and put it in the glove box on top of the registration, and I did it carefully, with the creases lined up, and then I drove the rest of the way home with my hands at ten and two.