Chapter Three
I woke to the smell of a kettle that had boiled dry.
The lamp was still on. Daylight at the window and the lamp still on, which I have never done, not once, not in sixty-one years. The nine-forty had gone past without me. I know because the glass had stopped shaking. I slept through the one thing that has never been late.
I did not look at the chair.
I have been honest with you for one night now. It has already become a habit, which is how you know a thing has cost you something. I got up. I put water in the black kettle and let it scream. I stood at the sink with my back to the room like a woman who has a reason.
Here is the reason. Last night I gave you half of it and called it the whole.
A book nobody reads is a book that isn't. I said it like a fact. It is a fact. What I did not say is the other end of it.
A keeper nobody reads is a keeper that isn't.
Sixty-one years I said it. Out loud, in my own voice, every night. The saying kept the book alive. The book kept me. I took that trade every night of my life and I was proud of it, and this morning I did not say it.
Nothing happened.
Nobody warns you about that part. The town went on being a town. The light came in the usual way. The post came and I did not answer it. I had spent sixty-one years believing I was the one holding up my end, so this morning I let go, to find out. The ceiling did not come down. It was the first free hour of my life and I spent it looking at a kettle.
Then I did the arithmetic, because that is what I do instead of feeling things. Sixty-one years is twenty-two thousand two hundred and sixty-five nights. I have said that sentence twenty-two thousand two hundred and sixty-five times. That is not a habit. That is a marriage.
I did not look at the chair until the light went.
And then I looked. The book was exactly where I put it. On the chair. Where you were. Closed. The lamp still burning over it. Nothing about it had changed except that it had stopped being mine.
I know how that sounds. It was mine for sixty-one years. It is not mine now. I set it down on that chair on purpose and I told you it was not a kindness, and I meant that as the truth, and it was also the coward's way of finding out whether it would come back to me.
It did not come back. It is a book. It does not come back. It waits.
So here is the last thing I do today, and I am not proud of this one either.
I pick it up.
Not because it needs me. It does not need me. It has you. I pick it up because I have been needed every night for sixty-one years, and I have forgotten how to be a woman in a room with a chair in it and nothing on the chair.
I open to the last page. I do not look at my own handwriting. I look for the second line, the one that was wet, because I want to know whether it has dried. That is what I have come to. Checking whether my own sentence has dried, the way you check a wound.
It has not dried.
It will not dry. Whoever wrote it wrote it tonight, and it was not me. That line was never my hand. It is the hand of whoever is holding it, and it is wet, and it is warm, and it is on the page right now. Which means someone is holding it right now.
I do not know where you are. I have never known. It does not matter any more. What matters is that the book is being written this minute, by someone who is not me, and the sentence they are writing is the one I have said for sixty-one years, and they have not stopped.
That is the only shape of hope I have left. I am not going to dress it up for you.
I put the kettle on. The nine-forty goes past at nine-forty and it shakes the glass, and the kettle goes on, and the water is ready before the tea is.
I read it aloud tonight.
The evening has started.
Next: Chapter Four