When the roads opened, I drove up to collect his things.
The nurse wasn’t on shift. The front desk told me her name was Rachel, and I wrote her a long thank-you card at the kitchen table that night. I meant to mail it. But I didn’t know her last name, and a few months later I heard the hospice had merged with a bigger hospital network and the staff had scattered. I kept telling myself I’d track her down.
I never did. The card is still in my desk drawer, in its envelope, with just one word on the front: Rachel.
I got up at two in the morning, opened the drawer, and took it out. Biscuit watched me from the bed with deep suspicion.
“It’s probably not her,” I told him. “There are a million nurses named Rachel.”
Biscuit yawned, as if to say, “Then why are you holding the envelope, genius?”
Chapter 8: Yellow Tulips
On Sunday, I put on my good sweater, my brown coat, and the bravest face I could find. I stopped by Fairlane Market for a bouquet of yellow tulips, because yellow felt right for a new birthday.
Denise wrapped them for me and refused to let me pay.
“Consider it my four dollars and thirty-six cents,” she said, winking.
The Harpers lived in a small blue house with white trim on a quiet street full of crunchy leaves. There was a hand-painted sign taped to the door. In very careful purple marker, it said “HAPPY NEW BIRTHDAY MOM,” with the N backward.
I knocked. The tulips were shaking a little in my hand.
The door opened, and there was Rachel.
She was thin and a little pale, wrapped in a long, oversized cardigan, with her hair pulled up in a messy bun. But her smile was enormous, and her eyes were the same serious gray as her daughter’s.
Lily peeked out from behind her, grinning like she’d personally arranged the whole thing.
“You must be Nora,” Rachel said. “The cake lady.”
And I froze.
Because I knew that voice.
I’d heard it only once, six years ago, through a crackly phone line in a freezing car on the side of a highway. But you don’t forget a voice that tells you, “I’m right here with him. I’m holding his hand.”
“Are you okay?” Rachel asked, tilting her head.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is going to sound strange. Did you ever work at Pinecrest Hospice? Up near Millbrook?”
Rachel’s eyebrows went up. “For six years. Why?”
My throat closed up. I tried to say it calmly, but it came out as a whisper. “Frank Bennett. Do you remember a patient named Frank Bennett? Six years ago, during a snowstorm?”
Rachel stared at me.
Then she put a hand over her mouth.
“The penguin man,” she said softly. “Oh my goodness. The penguin jokes. He told me one every single shift. ‘Why don’t penguins fly?'”
“Because they’re not tall enough to be pilots,” I said, and then I started crying right there on her porch, holding yellow tulips, in front of an eight-year-old and a confused mail carrier walking by.
Rachel stepped out, cardigan and all, and hugged me. A long, real hug. The kind her daughter gives.
“You were in the car,” she said into my shoulder. “In the snow. You told him the joke on the phone.”
“You held his hand for me.”
“He smiled when he heard you,” she said. “I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve told that story to new nurses for years.
About the daughter who couldn’t get there but still made her dad laugh.”
Lily looked back and forth between us with her mouth open. “Wait. You already know each other?”
Walt appeared in the doorway behind them, holding a spatula and looking baffled. “What did I miss?”
“Grandpa,” Lily announced, “this is the biggest coincidence in the history of the universe.”
For once, I didn’t think an eight-year-old was exaggerating.
