The zip tie took her three minutes and a butter knife. She set the cable on the counter and looked at the screen - black, waiting, a small rectangle that reflected the window and the bare oak tree beyond it. The charging brick had two ports and she plugged into the wrong one first, then the right one, and a thin sliver of green appeared at the top of the glass. She propped the iPad against the rooster's tail - where it sat at a slight angle, watching her the way the rooster always had.
She tapped the little fork-and-spoon square her daughter had circled in a text message with three arrows pointing at it. But her finger landed half an inch left, on a red number she thought might mean something urgent, and the screen filled with a grid of small bright squares - games, mostly - and something called a VPN for $4. 99 a week. A woman on one of the covers was holding a dumbbell and smiling the way nobody actually smiles. She pressed the side button the way her daughter had shown her, once, in passing, and the screen went dark.
The banner dropped down like a window shade - white, with a small keyhole icon and a blinking cursor already waiting inside a gray box. She typed her email address - the one she'd had since her nephew set it up for her, and hit the blue button. The wheel spun. She watched it the way she'd watched the old dryer's porthole window when it was deciding whether to stop. Then she turned the iPad face-down on the counter, next to the rooster, and ran the hot water until the steam came up and fogged her glasses, and began on the breakfast dishes.
The Rooster Watches the Screen Spin
Her daughter sat at the kitchen table with the iPad propped against the sugar bowl and tapped through screens that had no names her mother would recognize - just toggles and gray text in a font sized for younger eyes. The rooster watched from the counter. Twenty minutes in, she held it up so her mother could see: two squares on a white field, one the color of a swimming pool, one the color of a hospital gown, nothing else - no red numbers, no smiling woman with the dumbbell. She wrote the four digits on a Post-it - her mother's own birthday, backwards - pressed it inside the spice cabinet door, next to the paprika her mother had owned since the Carter administration, and said - just try it tomorrow morning with your coffee. The next day, and the day after, and for most of the mornings that followed, the iPad was propped against the rooster's tail when her daughter called, open to something with fennel in it - or a seven-letter word her mother already had three letters of and wanted to argue about.
Her daughter set the iPad on the counter and Delia picked it up the way she picked up a good melon, with both hands, already knowing. She filled in EGRET without lifting her eyes from the grid - seven letters, E already waiting in the corner where she'd left it. The screen went dark the way screens do, just gone - and she reached past the cumin and the onion powder and peeled the Post-it off the cabinet door without looking at it the way you look at something you're reading for the first time. Four digits, her own birthday walked backwards, and she pressed each one with her thumb and the crossword came back, the cursor still blinking inside the box where EGRET was going. She smoothed the Post-it back against the wood and closed the cabinet.
Two Icons and a Post-it
She had the notebook open flat with her left palm pressed against the spine the way you hold something that wants to close, and her right hand moved across the page in the careful print she'd used for grocery lists since before her daughter was born. The recipe called for the zest of two lemons and she wrote *zest* and then paused - the pen resting against her knuckle, and looked at the word the way she sometimes looked at a crossword clue that had more than one right answer. The rooster stood at the edge of the table where she'd moved him to make room for the notebook, his red comb chipped on one side, watching. The iPad held the recipe without flickering, the two small squares - swimming-pool blue - hospital gown gray - visible at the bottom of the screen past the picture of the cake, which was the color of good butter. The spice cabinet door was closed, the Post-it behind it, her birthday walking backwards in her daughter's handwriting, waiting to be needed.
Her granddaughter visited on a Sunday and found the iPad on the counter and said - without meaning anything by it, that there was a newer version of the crossword app, better, and tapped something twice before Delia could say anything. The screen filled up again - the smiling woman was back, holding a different piece of equipment - and there was a red banner across the top that said *Limited Time* in white letters. Her granddaughter swiped it away and handed it back and left for the afternoon. Delia set the iPad face-down next to the rooster and called her daughter, and her daughter drove over after dinner and sat at the kitchen table for fifteen minutes with the gray-text screen her mother would never learn to read, and put the two squares back - swimming-pool, hospital gown - while Delia stood at the counter tearing the bread for tomorrow's stuffing and didn't watch. The Post-it was still inside the cabinet door, the birthday still walking backwards - the paprika still older than the granddaughter by a decade.
The crossword that Wednesday had a clue about a Greek letter and she needed to look it up, so she pressed the gray square and the search box opened and she typed *omg* before she realized she'd meant *omega*, and what came back was a page full of jewelry, pendants mostly, gold letters on thin chains - and a small red dot appeared on the gray square that hadn't been there before. She set the iPad against the rooster's tail and went to deadhead the geraniums on the back step and stayed out there longer than the geraniums required. That evening she opened the spice cabinet for the oregano and saw the Post-it and peeled it off and carried it to the kitchen table and sat down with the iPad and pressed the four digits and then set the Post-it on the table in front of her where she could see it while she worked, the way she kept the measuring cup out even for amounts she'd known since her forties. She found the small gray square with the red dot and pressed it once, then again, and nothing changed, and she pressed the side button and the screen went dark and she pressed it again and the crossword came back - the Greek-letter clue still waiting, the red dot still there, patient as a stone. She wrote *red dot on gray square* in the margin of her recipe notebook, below the lemon zest, in the same careful print - and left a blank line under it for when she found out what it meant.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
