out of the trunk and draped over the back of the couch in the new living room before anything else in the house was unpacked, because Carla put it there herself, the first thing, and then stood back and looked at it with her hands on her hips like she was daring it to be a fire hazard.
The house in Hartland Glen was still the color of oatmeal. But my bedroom faced west.
Margaret had her heart valve replaced at the UK hospital on the eighteenth of November. Carla was working there by then, a supervisor in Health Information Management on the second floor of the Pavilion, and on the afternoon after the surgery she took me up to the cardiac unit on her lunch break, through all the corridors she already knew by heart, and we sat with Margaret for an hour. She was gray and tired and full of tubes, and she held my hand the whole time with her big chapped hand, and when the nurse came in she said, "This is my niece. This is my niece June," and the nurse said, "Well, hi, June," as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. I suppose it is. People have nieces.
Delphine Ott has sent us two more letters since. One is from a man in Indianapolis who was born in the Bethany Home on Christmas Eve, 1961, and whose block, in the fourth row, says Loretta S. Boy. 12-24-61. Noel. The other is from a woman in Knoxville born in August of that year, whose birthday doesn't match any block at all, and Carla wrote her a letter herself, a long, careful, kind one, explaining why, and I watched her rewrite it four times. Both of them are in the book. Every request gets written down. That's the rule.
* * *
I sewed the corner back on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
I did it at the dining table in the new house, in the afternoon, with the west blinds open and the light coming in low. Nell Brewer had been right. It was a straight cut, the easiest thing in the world to put back. I laid the triangle in its place, edge to edge, and pinned it, and turned the raw edges under, and began to stitch it closed with white thread, small, the way Grandma Ivy taught me. Smaller.
Carla came in from the kitchen and stood in the doorway for a while, watching.
"May I?" she said.
I looked up. "You don't know how."
"I know," said Carla. "That's why I'm asking."
So I showed her. I gave her a needle and threaded it for her and showed her how to load three stitches on at once and rock the needle through, and how to use the thimble, and she was terrible at it. Her stitches