The list began as an index card. Vera pressed a strip of masking tape across the top of it and smoothed it against the inside of the cabinet door, below the shelf paper and above the phone book with the broken spine, names down the left side in blue ballpoint, birthdays down the right. The spiral notebook came later, green cover, its first page already crowded by February with the names she'd migrated over in the same blue ink, plus three new ones she would have lost otherwise. Somewhere after that the notebook disappeared, and the list became a sheet of printer paper folded twice, living in the junk drawer under the tape gun and a ketchup packet from Arby's, its corner worn soft from being moved so many times to get at the batteries.
She found the notebook again the spring she reorganized the low cabinets. It was rubber-banded inside a bread bag behind two cans of cream of mushroom soup, and when she pulled it out her legs simply 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. The green cover carried a water ring the size of a coffee mug, and she thought of the rooster mug for no reason she could name. Near the back, three names were crossed out in pencil so light you could still read them. One name had a small star beside it that someone had gone over twice. Her own birthday was on the last page with a circle around it in red ink, and then another circle around that, and she could not remember drawing either one.
She typed Danny Kowalczyk into the white bar and the phone went bright for a second before the results came up. 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 with her hand flat on the laminate, which was cold, which she noticed. The notebook lay open to the last page, her own name in its two red circles. December still had seven blank lines at the bottom. She picked up the pen, the same blue one or one just like it, and held it over the fourteenth for a while without writing anything.
What she did instead was pull a fresh card from the back of the stack in the junk drawer, the narrow-ruled kind with a red margin, and smooth it flat on the counter with her palm. The ballpoint was the clear plastic kind with the cap missing, and she had to scribble on the back of her hand to get the ink started. Then she wrote Danny Kowalczyk across the top line, and beneath it March 8th, and held the pen there one extra second before lifting it. Just the birthday. Nothing in the column for the year he was born. Nothing at all for the other date, the one she now knew.
Inside the cabinet door, a strip of old tape still clung where the first card had been, curled at both ends and gray in the middle. She pressed the new card up beside it rather than over it. The pen she left balanced on the lip of the counter, in the groove where the laminate had bubbled up years ago from the heat of the dishwasher, capless, ready. She closed the cabinet and then opened it once more to look at the card, Danny's name across the top line in ink that had taken a moment to start, and then she went on with her afternoon, and March 8th went on waiting in the dark with the soup.
The next October she found a birthday card in the drugstore rack, a cake on the front, For Someone Special in gold foil, and she stood there long enough that a woman with a shopping basket asked if she was all right. She put the card back between one with balloons and one with a dog in a hat. Then she took it out again and carried it to the register and paid three dollars and forty-nine cents. At home she addressed the envelope to herself, sealed it, wrote Don't open across the flap in the blue pen, and set it on top of the notebook in the bread bag behind the soup, where the important things apparently lived now.
The following spring the notebook gave her a name she didn't know. Trudy Mack, April 19th, written in her own hand, in pencil, and she never used pencil. She stood at the counter and said the name out loud twice, then a third time, and nothing came. No kitchen, no coat, no laugh. She wrote who? in the margin in blue, felt bad about the question mark, and rubbed it away with her thumbnail until the paper went gray and soft. The bag went back behind the soup with Trudy still in it, April 19th and no face to go with it. That night she dreamed of a yellow kitchen she had never stood in, and somebody's birthday candles going out one at a time in the draft from a screen door.
A pen turned up in the pocket of her good coat, the wool one with the loose button, and she stood in the hallway holding it before she remembered that Gerald had given her that coat. Gerald of the dimpled card. Gerald, May 2nd. She put the pen in the junk drawer without using it. The April page of the notebook had a grease stain near the bottom now, a thumb or a chip, and Trudy Mack sat just above the stain in her unrecognized pencil. At the pharmacy that week Vera bought a new spiral notebook, college-ruled, red cover, and carried it home in its paper bag and set it on the counter, and looked at it for three days before she opened it and wrote, very slowly, her own name at the top of the first page, circled once in blue.
The red notebook had sat empty past that first page for three weeks when her granddaughter Pilar came over and asked what it was. Just a thing, Vera said. Pilar picked it up anyway, turned to the second page, and wrote Pilar Reyes-Ochoa, November 3rd, in purple marker, big looping letters, and drew a small sun beside it with eight rays coming off it. She left the marker on the counter with the cap off, and the tip dried a shade darker while the two of them ate soup at the table with the wobbly leg. That night Vera found the cap behind the fruit bowl and pressed it back onto the marker and laid 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. Then she opened the red notebook to the second page and looked for a long time at the sun with its eight rays. When she finally turned back to the first page, she wrote, in small careful letters under her own circled name: ask Pilar her friends.
