“How do you feel now?” Rena said.
“I’ve been asleep, sweetheart. I can’t tell yet.”
“Do you think you feel any better?”
“Why yes, seeing you always makes me feel better.”
She took Rena’s hand, and Mavis and I pulled up chairs beside her bed. We talked together for about an hour. A nurse came in once to take her temperature and her pulse and to check the drop chamber, while we waited for her to leave so we could go on talking. Then at eight-thirty another nurse stuck her head in the door to tell us visiting hours were over. We stood up to leave.
“Is it nice outside?” Edith said.
“Not bad,” I said. “Looks like another clear night.”
“I can’t always tell,” she said. “They won’t let me open any windows.”
“Why not?”
“They say the bugs will fly in.”
“There aren’t any bugs in April. Do you want me to open it?”
“If you would,” Edith said. “I was thinking maybe I could smell something.”
So I pulled the blinds and cranked the window open for her. Then Mavis and Rena hugged her and we left, with the promise that we would come back today, this Sunday evening. Outside her room the new deputy was still on guard in the hallway. Somebody had brought him a cup of coffee. We pushed past him and walked outside to the car. When we looked back at Edith’s room we saw that a nurse was there, shutting her window again. They weren’t going to let her breathe.
I’M DONE talking now. I’ve told all I know.
Only, before you leave, before it gets full dark, you have time to drive over there a half mile east and see what remains of that yellow house. Poking around, you might find some charred travel brochures and some heat-twisted forks and a cracked plate or two, and then, depending upon how long you stay there, you might still have time to go on into town and notice Lyman’s last green Pontiac rusting in the Holt junkyard with the weeds growing up around it, before you drive on to the cemetery, where you will find the three Goodnough headstones over there at the far edge across the fence from Otis Murray’s cornfield.
You go ahead and do all that. But I can’t go with you. I’ve promised to collect my wife and my daughter in town, and then we’re going back to the hospital to visit an old white-haired woman who, though she will be eighty years old on Thursday, is still in the ways that matter just as fine and beautiful as she must have been in 1922 when she was twenty-five and went riding out in the sandhills in a Model T with my dad and the windows were rolled down and the night air was blowing fresh in on them — all of that and it almost fifty-five years ago now without her ever understanding how to say anything like a continuous yes to herself.