LITMIR.BIZ

      Coming up the drive in the rental car, Cathy sees the sign and has to laugh. “Wyndham Falls. Gracious Retirement Living.”

      Not exactly how Della has described it.

      The building comes into view next. The main entrance looks nice enough. It’s big and glassy, with white benches outside and an air of medical orderliness. But the garden apartments set back on the property are small and shabby. Tiny porches, like animal pens. The sense, outside the curtained windows and weather-beaten doors, of lonely lives within.

      When she gets out of the car, the air feels ten degrees warmer than it did outside the airport that morning, in Detroit. The January sky is a nearly cloudless blue. No sign of the blizzard Clark’s been warning her about, trying to persuade her to stay home and take care of him. “Why don’t you go next week?” he said. “She’ll keep.”

      Cathy’s halfway to the front entrance when she remembers Della’s present and doubles back to the car to get it. Taking it out of her suitcase, she’s pleased once again by her gift-wrapping job. The paper is a thick, pulpy, unbleached kind that counterfeits birch bark. (She had to go to three different stationery stores to find something she liked.) Instead of sticking on a gaudy bow Cathy clipped sprigs from her Christmas tree—which they were about to put at the curb—and fashioned a garland. Now the present looks handmade and organic, like an offering in a Native American ceremony, something given not to a person but to the earth.

      What’s inside is completely unoriginal. It’s what Cathy always gives Della: a book.

      But it’s more than that this time. A kind of medicine.

      Ever since moving down to Connecticut Della has complained that she can’t read anymore. “I just don’t seem to be able to stick with a book lately,” is how she puts it on the phone. She doesn’t say why. They both know why.

      One afternoon last August, during Cathy’s yearly visit to Contoocook, where Della was still living at the time, Della mentioned that her doctor had been sending her for tests. It was just after five, the sun falling behind the pine trees. To get away from the paint fumes they were having their margaritas on the screened-in porch.

      “What kind of tests?”

      “All kinds of stupid tests,” Della said, making a face. “For instance, this therapist she’s been sending me to—she calls herself a therapist but she doesn’t look more than twenty-five—she’ll make me draw hands on clocks. Like I’m back in kindergarten. Or she’ll show me a bunch of pictures and tell me to remember them. But then she’ll start talking about other things, see. Trying to distract me. Then later on she’ll ask what was in the pictures.”

      Cathy

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