Ruth found the first one nine days after we buried Walter. It was stuck right to the side of his old orange blood pressure bottle with those crooked block letters he always used when he was writing in a hurry. Blue one with breakfast, sweetheart. That was all it said.
By August she had twenty-seven of them. They turned up in the silverware drawer right on top of the dessert forks, inside the pockets of his winter wool coat even though it was ninety degrees outside, and tucked down deep into the Folgers coffee can where he used to keep loose quarters and rubber bands.
Walter had written every single one of them on those narrow yellow sticky notes from the hardware store down on Main Street. Not the pretty square ones that stay put. The cheap kind that curl up at the corners and give up the second the house gets a little humid from boiling potatoes.
Ruth called me the first time because she was plain mad. She dialed my number right before church and her voice had that sharp edge she only ever used when Walter tracked red mud across her freshly mopped linoleum. He is still bossing me around from the graveyard, she told me.
I remember standing by my stove waiting for water to boil for oatmeal, holding the phone tight against my ear. But even while she was fussing about him telling her to take her pills, I heard that hollow sound underneath her words. That sound houses get when the man who built the porch steps isn’t walking across them anymore.
Walter had passed away in June after fifty-two years of marriage. He was seventy-six, and he had been sick long enough for everybody in the family to start telling each other that we were prepared for it. That is just something people say when they want to feel useful while they are standing around waiting for the inevitable to happen. Ruth and Walter lived in a small brick ranch just outside of Newnan with a concrete carport, three straggly tomato plants that Walter watered every evening like clockwork, and a chest freezer in the utility room full of casseroles from the ladies at the First Baptist church who wrote their names on masking tape so Ruth wouldn’t have to wash and return their Pyrex dishes.
The notes just kept coming. Every few days Ruth would find another one hiding in plain sight. She found one inside her old hymnal right where the page was folded for In the Garden.
She found another under the lid of the flour tin where she kept the measuring cup. There was one stuck right to the back of the plastic remote control, and Walter had written right on it in black marker, Channel 11 if the Braves are losing and you need to yell at someone.
The one that finally made me start driving over every Tuesday and Friday was found on top of the washing machine. Don’t lift the wet towels. Call Linda. I am serious.
That was me. Linda. His sister-in-law, the one he always teased about putting too much sugar in her iced tea.
So I started going over twice a week under the excuse of helping her fold sheets and scrub the bathroom sink. But the real reason was just to see if she had brushed her hair that morning and whether she remembered to open the front curtains to let the sun in. The house always smelled like Vicks VapoRub, stale coffee grounds, and the cedar chips Walter used to scatter on the floor of the bedroom closet because he was convinced the moths in Coweta County were specifically plotting against his good flannel shirts.
I didn’t say anything to her about the medicine chart until mid-July. Walter had made it himself on a lined piece of yellow legal paper, ruling the columns with a ballpoint pen for morning, noon, and night. He had even drawn little square boxes for Ruth to check off after she swallowed her pills. His own name was written right at the top of the page too, but his checkmarks stopped halfway down the column.
He knew. He had known long before the doctors finally stopped trying new medicines that he wasn’t going to be around to point at the bottles and fuss at her for forgetting.
Ruth pretended she was annoyed by the whole thing. She called him an old goat while she was putting the dishes away. She told me he probably hid one of those notes in the toilet tank just to aggravate her from the great beyond. But I noticed the way she handled them. She didn’t throw a single one away. Instead, she took an empty shoe box that used to hold her orthopedic walking shoes and turned it into a little archive, tucking every single yellow slip right between her handwritten cornbread recipe card and her mother’s faded recipe for peach cobbler.
On August eighteenth, my phone rang at six-thirteen in the morning. I didn’t even wait for it to ring a second time. I knew before I even flipped the cover open.
I found another one, Ruth said.
Her voice wasn’t mad this time. It was small. Ruth is seventy-four years old. She has raised four children through the chicken pox and the teenage years, she fought Blue Cross insurance for six months over a billing error after her knee replacement, and back in seventy-four she once chased a rabid raccoon off the front porch with a kitchen broom. She is not a small woman in any way that counts. But on that Tuesday morning, she sounded like she had shrunk down to the size of a bird.
I threw on a cardigan over my nightgown, shoved my bare feet into my house slippers, and drove my Buick over to her place before the sun was even fully clear of the pine trees across the road.
She was standing right in the middle of the kitchen holding the wall calendar. It was still August, but Walter had always had this habit of flipping the calendar pages three weeks early because he liked looking ahead at the empty squares. Behind the calendar, taped directly to the painted drywall with two strips of yellow masking tape, was the final note.
Call Linda before you read this.
Right beneath it on the counter sat a plain white manila envelope with my name written across the front in that same familiar, stubborn handwriting. Linda Lou. He hadn’t called me Linda Lou since my husband passed away five years ago, preferring to use it whenever he wanted to remind me I was still his kid sister no matter how old my knees got.
Ruth wouldn’t touch the envelope. She was staring at it like it might bite her if she got too close.
I don’t want the last of him today, she whispered, her hands flat against the formica table.
I pulled out a chair and sat down right beside her. The red vinyl seat let out a long, slow hiss of air under my weight. We sat there in the quiet kitchen for a solid five minutes, just listening to the old refrigerator cycle on with a heavy shudder and a single crow cawing out in the pecan tree by the driveway. The house smelled faintly of stale coffee and the lemon furniture polish Walter used to use every Saturday morning while listening to Paul Harvey on the radio.
Finally, Ruth reached out with one finger, pushed the white envelope across the laminate toward my side of the table, and pulled her hand back into her lap like she was drawing away from a hot stove.
I picked it up, looked across the table at my sister’s pale face, and slid my thumb under the paper flap to break the seal.
Inside wasn’t a note of farewell or poetry. Walter wasn’t a poetry man. It was a single printed appointment card from the elder care coordination office over in Peachtree City, dated for the following Thursday at ten in the morning, along with a cashier’s check made out in an exact amount that made my breath catch in my throat.
Below the card was one last yellow sticky strip folded in half. I unfolded it carefully, smoothing the curled corner against my thumb before I read it out loud to her.
I paid for three days a week so she won’t have to eat alone, and I told the girl named Sarah to bring buttermilk biscuits on Tuesdays because you like them, Ruth. Don’t you dare be stubborn.
Ruth didn’t say anything for a long time. She just looked down at the little yellow slip of paper resting on the table between us, and then she reached out and touched the corner of it with the tip of her finger, right where the adhesive had lost its stick.
Get your purse, Linda, she finally said, her voice shaking just enough to let me know the wall had finally cracked. We need to go see about those biscuits before they get cold.
