I am in the hospital in Ely. I would like to see you. Tuesday the 22nd, afternoon. O. Ketterman
He had read that card perhaps two hundred times. He had it in his wallet right now.
It was the same handwriting as the note. He was sure of it. He had been sure of it the instant he unfolded the notebook paper. Which made no sense, because the note talked about her in the third person. She kept every one.
"Your grandmother wrote this," he said to the girl, carefully. He had guessed it from the first; there was something about the set of her eyes, a cast to the brow, that he had seen in a newspaper photograph thirty-three years ago and never forgotten, the photograph of a young widow at a graveside. "Mrs. Ketterman is your grandma."
The girl, who had been sitting with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, nodded without looking at him.
"What's your name?"
"Ludie."
"Ludie. That's a good name. Short for something?"
"Ludivine. It was my great-great-grandma's. Nobody can spell it."
"Ludie, I don't understand the note. It's her handwriting. But it talks about her like she's somebody else."
Ludie scrubbed at her nose with the cuff of the pink jacket. "That's because she didn't write it to you," she said. "She wrote it to herself."
He waited. He had learned to wait in prison and perfected it in the program, where you learn that people tell the truth slower than they tell anything else.
"She had a stroke," Ludie said. "Two years ago. Not a big one, the doctor said, but then she had some little ones after, and now she forgets things. Not everything. She knows me. She knows Mom. She knows how to do the crossword faster than anybody. But she'll forget she already took her pills, or what day it is, or that she called somebody. So she has a notebook. A green one. She writes notes to herself in it. Like, Ondine, you already fed the cat. Ondine, Daria is coming Sunday, not Saturday. Ondine, the man from the gas company is not a scam, you can let him in." Ludie almost smiled. "She calls herself Ondine in it, like she's her own mom."