Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
A Ledger of Small Goodbyes
A widow keeps a dated ledger of the things her late husband leaves behind one item at a time, pricing nothing, and the ledger keeps gaining entries on its own.
- dated: "After the long rain, early spring"
- narrator: "Vera Lunn, retired caretaker"
- reliability: unreliable
3rd. He left the slippers first. Not by the chair where I would have found them belonging to some ordinary morning, but under my own bed, on his side of the room, lined up the way his mother lined up shoes in a photograph I once laughed at. I have put them on the windowsill with the weather glass. The soles were still cozy. I keep pricing things in this ledger out of some habit of his that got into me, and the price column stays empty, because what would I put. He is not retail.
4th. My handwriting has come home different. The ledger itself has a line I cannot account for, dated the 2nd, in pencil, in my hand or near enough that I accuse myself of writing it and forgetting, and the line says: nothing taken. I do not write in pencil. I stopped in pencil at school. The entry is dated the day before he left, entry under it in my ink, ordinary entry, eggs and the dustpan and the fourth bell trying again. Above all, my own hand did not do those descenders. Who did. A widow asks who did the descenders and hears nothing back and that is the whole of her society nowadays.
9th. Sunday did not come. I want to write that plainly and then go on to the small things, because the small things are what I am keeping house on. Sunday as an idea went out of the week the way a word goes out of your mouth that you were saying to yourself and were not saying. The milk still comes. The bell still rings for it. There was no Sunday in the middle of the week, there was a hole with Sunday's shape in it, and the tradesman stepped over the hole with his cart, and I let him. Later, cooking, I found I had left one portion off, plate, knife, the chair not pulled out, no ache in the doing of it. That is when I cried.
11th. Inventory instead of feelings. Gone: the slippers, one Sunday, the feel of his coat on the hook (the coat remains, the feel is not in it), the second tooth glass, the rustle at the door of a night that used to be him turning back. Not gone: the rest. I am trying to run his leaving like a stocktake done honestly, a line at a time, because a caretaker's answer to everything is to count it, and I swore I would not count him and I am counting him and the total comes out at nothing every time, which is where the price column belongs.
14th. To be honest tonight, because a ledger deserves it: I do not think the descenders were mine and I do not think the under-bed slippers were put there by a draught, and there is a line ruled at the bottom of the 4th in pencil that I did not rule, and it runs to the edge of the page as if the line is going somewhere further than the paper. I have not followed it. Widows do not get to follow things, we get to stay, that is what staying used to mean. Tomorrow is Sunday's hole again. I will put the kettle there and see if anything drinks.