The legal pad already had three crossed-out questions at the top, scratched through so hard the pen had scored the paper. She'd written *do you miss me* and then crossed it out before the ink was dry.
The mud on his cleats was still wet enough to shine on the screen, a little smear of Portland field on her kitchen table in Akron. She got through *how is your teacher with the long name* and *did you try the soup your mom said she made* before the battery icon in the corner went red, which was somehow a relief, something to blame. He said bye the way you'd say it to a checkout clerk - one syllable, already gone, and she drew a neat line through *do you have a best friend yet* even though she hadn't asked it.
She kept a box of first-class stamps in the silverware drawer, between the good forks and the ones she never used, and she went through a book of them every month. The scratch-offs came from the BP on Maple - two dollars each, and she scratched them herself first to make sure they weren't winners, because a winning ticket might get lost in a backpack or traded away for something, and she needed him to scratch. She cut the comics with the good scissors, the ones for fabric - because the edges came out cleaner. The photos she printed at the Walgreens on Exchange, four-by-sixes on glossy paper, and she always ordered two copies - one for the envelope, one she slid into the back of her own address book, behind the Z's where she kept the things she couldn't file anywhere else.
Marcus set the photo face-down on the carpet next to a wad of silver wrapping paper and a Price sticker that had stuck to his elbow - and was already pressing buttons on the controller before the photo stopped sliding. Rosalie's face on the laptop screen didn't change - still smiling, still smiling - and then his mother looked over at the glowing rectangle on the TV tray and the half-second before she found her own smile back was just her eyes, dark and still, holding Rosalie's. Rosalie reached forward and adjusted the laptop angle, a small unnecessary adjustment - her fingers on the hinge.
She tore the sheet off with two hands, the way you'd tear a paper towel, and folded it once along the crease her thumbnail made. The drawer stuck at the same spot it always did, and she lifted and pulled, lifted and pulled. The folded square went on top of the others - she didn't count them - looked away before she could - and she pushed the drawer shut with her hip until she heard the click.
The sheets were held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle and snapped when he lifted the stack, and the bottom page, dated February of some year he had to count back to reach, had a coffee ring on it that wasn't from his grandmother's cup because she'd taken her coffee black, no saucer - standing at the sink. He stood at the counter under the Albuquerque fluorescents holding the whole inch of it, and the top sheet was from eight days before the hospice, the questions crossed out in the same blue pen, including one he could read through the scoring: *what does your laugh sound like now. * He set them on the counter next to his own keys and his own phone and didn't pick them up again for a long time.
She bought a book about Portland once, a thin paperback from the library sale table - and dog-eared the page with the bridges because she thought he might have crossed one, and she kept it open on the nightstand so she could look at the photograph before she turned out the light, the Willamette gray and wide under a sky she'd never stood beneath. The page got soft at the corner from her thumb. In the morning she'd find her reading glasses resting on the spine where she'd set them down in the dark, and she'd put them back on her face and go start the coffee, leaving the book open to the same bridge - the same gray water, the glossy page already starting to wrinkle from a winter's worth of nights.
She found a YouTube video of a Portland youth soccer league and watched the whole thing twice, leaning close to the screen, pausing on the sidelines where the parents stood in their rain jackets, looking for his face in the blur of small faces - knowing it wasn't him, knowing it wasn't his field, watching anyway until her eyes went dry. She wrote down the name of a street sign visible in one frame - SE Stark - in the margin of the TV guide she still got in the mail, circling it twice with a ballpoint. The TV guide went under the nightstand next to the Portland book, its spine bent back.
She ordered a youth soccer magazine from the back page of the TV guide - a subscription, eight dollars for six issues, and when the first one came she read every caption under every photograph and then cut out the ones with mud on the jerseys because he'd mentioned mud once, back in August, the single word *muddy* in a text she still had - and she pressed the clippings flat inside a hardcover copy of *Charlotte's Web* she'd bought at the same library sale, the cover price still penciled on the first page in someone else's handwriting.
She called the Walgreens on SE Stark Street in Portland - she had the number from the area code she'd looked up in the front of the phone book she still kept - and asked the pharmacist whether the youth soccer fields were close by, and the pharmacist said he didn't know, he was from Ohio, and she thanked him and held the receiver against her chest for a moment before she set it back in the cradle. The phone book was open to the Oregon area codes on the kitchen table when she went to bed. In the morning she found she'd set her coffee cup on it in the dark - a ring on the page, and she blotted it carefully with the corner of her housecoat before she closed the book and put it back in the drawer, spine up, the way you'd file something you meant to find again.
She found a map of Portland in the glove compartment of her Buick - a freebie from an AAA office years back, stiff at the folds - and she spread it across the kitchen table and used a red pen to draw a small circle around SE Stark - pressing hard enough to dent the paper. Then she sat looking at the circle for a while, and at the green tangle of park shapes nearby, and at the thin blue thread of the Willamette running down the left side, and she drew a second, smaller circle where she thought a soccer field might be - not knowing, just guessing by the green. She refolded it wrong the first time and had to start over, panel by panel, until the original creases lined up again. The map went into Charlotte's Web with the clippings, and she smoothed the cover down flat with her palm before she put it back on the shelf between the cookbooks - spine out.
