Gus set the mug down without looking at where it landed, and some coffee sloshed onto the Formica and he left it. The legal pad had one line on it: Renata's name, in her own handwriting, from when she'd uncapped the pen and needed something to do with it. He said the porch had taken eleven weekends, maybe twelve - and he'd used a level his father-in-law gave him that he still had somewhere. The pen rolled a half-inch toward the coffee ring and stopped.
She wrote *Dad's wishes* in the top margin and then held the pen above the next line for a moment, not pressing down. Gus had moved to the window and was saying something about cedar versus pine, how the neighbor had gone with cedar and it would silver out in a few years, watch. Renata capped the pen. The cap made a small click. She set it parallel to the legal pad, the way her mother used to set a knife beside a plate when she was done.
The clipboard had a pen attached to it by a silver chain - the kind that always ran out of ink. Renata said *I think so* and the nurse wrote something on the top sheet without looking up. Down the hall a door opened and closed and the smell of something antiseptic moved through the air and then was gone. The nurse asked for the proxy holder's name and Renata said her own name, or started to, and then stopped. The legal pad was forty minutes away on the kitchen table, Renata's name on it in Renata's own handwriting, which wasn't the same thing at all.
The Porch and the Fence
Marcus's voice on the phone kept breaking up - the way it did when he walked and talked, and Renata could hear a car door and then wind. He said *Dad was clear about this, Renata, he said it at Christmas, he said no machines - he said it more than once* and she was looking at the dry-erase board on the wall where someone had written *Dr. Okafor* in green marker and underlined it twice. She remembered a Sunday in March, the truck stop outside Salida, Gus with his hands around a ceramic mug saying *I want every chance, I don't care what it costs, I'm not going out like some - * and then the waitress had come. Dr.
Okafor came in while she was still holding the pen and said something about the window they had - and Renata pressed down before she understood what her hand was doing. The signature looked like her signature always looked, which surprised her. A nurse peeled the yellow copy off the bottom and the sound it made was the sound of tape coming off a wall. Marcus called back at four-seventeen and she let it go to voicemail and stood at the window watching an orderly wheel an empty chair across the parking lot, very slowly, for no reason she could see. She still has the legal pad.
She found it under the Christmas wrap and a flashlight with no batteries, the yellow very yellow still - her own handwriting at the top where she'd pressed hard enough to leave a groove in the second page. The single line - *Dad's wishes* - and then nothing, the rest of the page white and slightly wavy from where the coffee ring had dried at the corner. She ran her thumb along the groove and thought about cedar, how the neighbor's porch had silvered out exactly the way Gus said it would. She put the pad back under the Christmas wrap. She left the flashlight where it was.
What the Clipboard Asked
Marcus sent a card with no occasion printed on the front, just a watercolor cardinal on a branch, which Gus would have called fussy. She propped it against the sugar bowl and left it there for three days before she opened it. The handwriting went all the way to the edges the way his always did - crowding the corners, and at one point he'd crossed something out and written over it and she could see both versions. She read it twice standing up, then sat down, then read the crossed-out part again with her thumb over the rest. The coffee had gone the color of the Formica by the time she set it down.
Her neighbor Carol brought a casserole in a dish with her name taped to the bottom and stayed for forty minutes, and somewhere in the middle of it mentioned that her own children had a folder - a whole binder actually, color-coded, everything in writing and notarized and copies made. Renata said *that's smart* and refilled Carol's water glass and watched a sparrow land on the porch railing and leave. The binder sat in Carol's car, Carol said, in case anything happened while she was out - and she said it the way she might mention a good parking spot, something solved and settled and requiring no further thought. After Carol left, Renata washed both glasses and set them in the rack and stood at the sink looking out at the porch, the cedar boards silvered just like Gus had said they would, in the time it had taken.
Renata found the hospital bracelet in her coat pocket in April - the plastic kind with the small metal clasp, Gus's name printed in a font that made it look like a receipt. She stood in the parking lot of the grocery store with it looped over two fingers and a woman pushed a cart past her and the cart had a bad wheel and made a sound like a question, over and over, until it didn't. Inside, she put bananas in the cart and then stood in front of the soup cans for a long time without taking any. At the register the cashier asked if she had their rewards card and Renata said yes and then couldn't find it and the line behind her grew and she said never mind - never mind, I'll just pay, and her voice came out a different size than she intended. She put the bracelet on the windowsill above the kitchen sink when she got home, next to a smooth gray stone Gus had carried back from somewhere he never said, and it stayed there through the rest of the winter and into a spring she wasn't ready for.
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.
