The list in the junk drawer was finally failing Vera - as names of loved ones smudged under decades of kitchen grease. But you can reclaim these fading memories by creating a more permanent record that honors those connections forever.
She pressed a strip of masking tape across the top of the card and smoothed it against the inside of the cabinet door, below the shelf paper and above the phone book with the broken spine. The spiral notebook came later, green cover, its first page already crowded by February with names she'd migrated over in the same blue ink, plus three new ones she'd have lost otherwise. Somewhere after that the notebook disappeared and there was just a sheet of printer paper - folded twice, living in the junk drawer under the tape gun and a ketchup packet from Arby's with the corner worn soft from being moved so many times.
The notebook was rubber-banded inside a bread bag behind two cans of cream of mushroom soup, and when she pulled it out her legs just quit and she sat down on the linoleum right there in front of the open cabinet. The pages had gone wavy from some old damp, and the green cover had a water ring on it the size of a coffee mug, and she thought about the rooster mug for no reason she could name. Three names near the back were crossed out in pencil so light you could still read them - and one had a small star beside it that someone had gone over twice, and her own birthday was on the last page with a circle in red ink around it and then another circle around that.
She typed *Danny Kowalczyk* into the white bar and the phone went bright for a second before the results came up, and the first one had his name in blue and underneath it the name of a funeral home in Akron and a date in June of the year before last. She set the phone face-down on the counter next to the bread bag and the rubber bands and stood there with her hand flat on the laminate, which was cold, which she noticed. The notebook was still open to the last page - her own name in its two red circles, and December had seven lines left blank at the bottom, and she picked up the pen - the same blue one, or one just like it - and held it over the fourteenth without writing anything.
She pulled a card from the back of the stack in the junk drawer, the narrow-ruled kind with the blue lines and the red margin - and smoothed it flat on the counter with her palm. The ballpoint was the clear plastic kind with the cap missing, and she had to press hard on the back of her hand first to get the ink started. Then she wrote *Danny Kowalczyk* across the top line, and underneath it *March 8th*, and she held the pen there an extra second before she lifted it - just the birthday, nothing in the column for the year he was born - nothing for the other date she now knew.
The cabinet door had a strip of old tape still stuck along the inside, curled at both ends and grey at the middle, and she pressed the new card up beside it instead of over it. The pen she left on the lip of the counter where the laminate had bubbled up slightly from the heat of the dishwasher years ago, balanced there in the groove, still capless. She closed the cabinet door and then opened it once more and looked at the card - Danny's name across the top line in the ink that had taken a moment to start.
The next October she found a birthday card in the drugstore rack with a cake on the front and *For Someone Special* in gold foil, and she stood there long enough that the woman with the basket asked if she was all right. She put it back between a card with balloons and one with a dog in a hat, and then she took it out again and carried it to the register and paid three dollars and forty-nine cents for it. At home she addressed the envelope to herself, sealed it, and wrote *Don't open* in the blue pen across the flap - and set it on top of the notebook in the bread bag behind the soup.
The following spring she found a birthday in the notebook she didn't recognize - *Trudy Mack, April 19th*, written in her own hand but in pencil, which she never used - and she stood at the counter saying the name out loud twice, then a third time - and nothing came. She wrote *who?* in the margin in the blue pen and then felt bad about it and erased the question mark with her thumbnail until the paper went grey and soft. The bread bag went back behind the soup with Trudy still in it, April 19th and no last known face, and that night she dreamed about a yellow kitchen she'd never been in, somebody's birthday candles going out one by one in a draft from a screen door.
She found a pen in the pocket of her good coat, the wool one with the loose button - and she stood in the hallway with it before she remembered that Gerald had given her that coat, Gerald of the dimpled card, Gerald May 2nd, and she put the pen in the junk drawer without using it. The April page of the notebook had a grease stain near the bottom from something, a thumb - a chip, and Trudy Mack's name sat just above it in its unrecognized pencil. She bought a new spiral notebook at the pharmacy, college-ruled, red cover, and carried it home in the paper bag and set it on the counter and looked at it for three days before she opened it to the first page and wrote - very slowly, her own name at the top, circled once in blue.
The red notebook had sat empty past the first page for three weeks when her granddaughter Pilar came over and asked what it was, and she said just a thing, and Pilar picked it up and wrote *Pilar Reyes-Ochoa - November 3rd* in purple marker on the second page, big looping letters, and drew a small sun beside it with eight rays. She left the marker on the counter with the cap off, and the ink dried to a darker purple at the tip while they ate soup together at the table with the wobbly leg. That night she found the cap behind the fruit bowl and pressed it onto the marker and put it in the junk drawer next to the capless blue pen, the two of them side by side in the groove near the Arby's packet. She opened the red notebook to the second page and looked at the sun with its eight rays for a long time before she turned back to the first page and wrote - in small careful letters under her own circled name, *ask Pilar her friends.
