Raymond glanced at Eileen’s photograph. “I talk to her sometimes.” “That’s okay. She probably talks back.” The laugh surprised him. It came out rough and unpracticed, and Nora smiled at the sound of it. “Come live with us,” she said. “Ben and I talked about it. We can set up the back bedroom. The kids would love it. Cedar Falls isn’t far.”
“I can’t do that.” “Why not?” “Because this is where I belong, this land, whatever’s left of it.” Nora studied him across the table. “Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll keep coming.” “You have your own family to worry about. The drive is three hours round trip. You’re spending money you can’t afford.” “Don’t tell me what I can’t afford, Dad.” “Nora—” “I’m coming. Every Saturday. That’s not a negotiation.”
She left at 9:30, carrying Sam to the car while Lily walked ahead with a flashlight Ben had given her. Raymond stood on the trailer step and watched Nora buckle the children in, watched her pause beside the driver’s door and look back at him. She raised a hand. He raised his. The taillights moved down the gravel road, turned onto the county blacktop, and disappeared.
Raymond went inside. The trailer smelled like chicken and rice and coffee and the faint sweetness of Sam’s shampoo. He opened his notebook and sat for a long time before writing. Nora, November 22nd, fifth visit. Brought curtains she sewed herself, cooked Eileen’s recipe, asked me to live with them. I said no. She said she would keep coming. She drove three hours today and spent money she doesn’t have. She never asked for anything, not once, not about the will, the property, the accounts. She asked if I was eating. She asked if I was lonely. She fixed the cabinet hinge.
He set the pen down and looked at the four columns of names in his notebook. Three columns had two or three entries each. Nora’s column was filling the page. The following Saturday, just before ten in the morning, Raymond heard the gravel crunch under tires. He pulled back the blue curtain Nora had hung and saw her station wagon coming up the drive, the sun catching the dust behind it. Lily was waving from the back window. He put the coffee on before she reached the door.
December arrived with a cold snap that frosted the trailer windows from the inside. Raymond woke each morning to patterns of ice on the glass, fern-shaped crystals that caught the early light and melted by noon. The furnace ran constantly now, rattling in its housing like a tin drum, and the propane bill climbed in a way that was almost funny given that the man paying it could have heated a mansion.
Nora did not miss a Saturday. She brought heavier groceries as the cold settled in. Stew meat, potatoes, onions, things that could simmer on the stove and fill the trailer with warmth. She brought a second space heater from Ben’s garage and plugged it in near the fold-down bed. She brought Sam’s drawings, which she taped to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like farm animals.
The trailer was accumulating evidence of her. Blue curtains, a crocheted blanket on the couch, a jar of wildflowers she replaced each visit even when the flowers were just dried stalks she found along the road. Harold came by on a Wednesday in mid-December, stomping snow off his boots on the trailer step. He brought a pound of bacon from his freezer and a look on his face that Raymond recognized. Harold had something to say and was deciding how to say it.