"Do you know what I knew about you?" she said. "Before Saturday? I knew your name. I knew you were drunk. I knew you got eight years and served six and got out. That's what I knew. My mother told me when I was twelve and she told me in about four sentences and then she told me that we were never going to talk about it again, and we didn't. Not once. Twenty-two years. And then she has a stroke and she starts writing in that notebook, and I find a card in it that says Bonner Wenzel, Tuesday, and I think she's confused, I think it's some old thing coming loose in her head. And then I go to her house to get her nightgowns and I find eleven boxes of you."
"Mom," said Ludie, behind her.
"Not now, Lu."
"Mom, she wrote a note. I gave it to him."
Daria Ketterman turned around. Bonner saw her see the folded square in his hand, and saw her understand what it was, and saw her understand where it had come from.
"You tore it out," she said to her daughter.
"Yes."
"You know you're not supposed to tear pages out."
"I know."
"Those are Grandma's. Those are how she remembers."
"I know," said Ludie, and began, finally, to cry, not loud, the kind of crying that is mostly about holding still. "But she'll remember this one. She'll remember this one even without the paper. You know she will."
Daria looked at her daughter for a long moment. Then she held out her hand to Bonner, without looking at him, and he put the note in it, and she unfolded it and read it standing in the parking lot in the late September sun, with the wind coming off the Schell Creek Range smelling of sage and the first cold of fall.
She read it once. Then she folded it back up along its creases, carefully, the way you would fold something that belonged to someone else, and put it in the pocket of her fleece.