People were always coming to see Lucille.

People brought food for her, or took her for a bath, or gave her a check-up. Sometimes they didn’t do any of these things—they only wanted to sit and talk. And every single one of them knew her name, which struck her as odd. After all, so many of them were complete strangers.

Then again, there were a lot of other residents in this building, in rooms of their own all up and down the hall from hers, so she might have met them and not remembered it.

After all, a person couldn’t be expected to remember such a large amount of people, especially when they came in and out of her room at all hours.

Lucille liked her room.

 It was bright and pleasant, with homemade collages scattered on the walls all around her bed. Flowers of all kinds, mostly. Some were big and yellow with bright centers, some were dainty bell shapes, some vivid purple, and there were pictures of other plants too, with long green beans hanging from them, and red juicy spheres.

She knew the spheres had an actual name, but at the moment it escaped her.

Someone had written on each collage: “Vegetables”, for one, “Flowers”, for another. One called “Seasons” had pictures of trees—bright and flowering, brilliant and green, shining with all sorts of pretty colors, stark and bare against a grey sky.

Occasionally there would be a collage she hadn’t seen before, and she would sit in her chair and examine it closely, taking in all the colors and shapes and words. A stranger would come in with a tray of food and see her sitting there and say, “Oh, yes, that’s one of your favorites, isn’t it,” and she’d agree that yes, it was, even though she’d never seen it before. Because all the collages were her favorites.

There were collages of people as well, with names written underneath. Some of the people looked familiar, and some didn’t. Every so often, as she read the names written under each picture, she’d catch a faint whiff of some nice, warm scent. Sometimes it was spicy and woodsy, sometimes floral and soft, sometimes smoky and sweet.

She never knew when she would smell these fragrances next, and she could never figure out where they came from. It was a real shame, too, because they made her feel relaxed and happy, while the regular smell of her room made her crinkle her nose against its harshness.

Occasionally, she’d hear the faint strains of a song in her mind when she smelled the fragrances, but she didn’t tell anyone about that. She didn’t want them to think she was crazy.

She felt good today. There had been pancakes for breakfast, with the long strips of salty meat that she liked (but couldn’t quite recall the name for), and a kind lady had helped her take a bath. She didn’t feel any pains, and she didn’t need to use the washroom, so she could relax.

Fragments of a quiet conversation drifted in from the hallway, discussing how someone was doing. Lucille heard only “restful night” and “good breakfast”, and “thank you”, before there was a quiet knock against her open door.

“Are you up for company?”

That voice. She recognized that voice.

“Jimmy?”

She turned to see a man with light brown hair and soft hazel eyes. He gave her a huge smile.

“You remember me.”

She laughed. He was always so silly. “Like I’d forget my own brother!”

The man lifted his hand to his mouth, turning his head to clear his throat. When he looked back to her again, his smile wasn’t quite as wide.

“I’m…,” he started, but trailed off into what was almost a sigh. “I thought you might like a visitor.”

“Of course! There’s a nice chair over there, very soft and comfortable.” She pointed.

Lucille’s mother had told her “ladies don’t point”, but that had always seemed like such a stupid rule, and she hadn’t made a fuss about it with her own children. Pointing was the most direct way to show what you needed.

 He nodded and crossed the room, drumming the fingers of one hand against his thigh.

“How’ve you been?” she asked, as he arranged himself in the chair. “How’s school?”

“Fine,” he nodded, his smile tight. “How do you feel?”

“Pretty good, today.”

“Good enough to take a walk in the garden?” He gazed toward the window and lifted his eyebrows.

She considered. “Is it nice outside?”

“Oh, it’s gorgeous! I went for a bike ride this morning. I meant to only go five miles but I wound up almost doubling that, it was such a perfect day.” He stood, the wide grin back on his face. “Come on, walk with me. It’ll make you really happy.”

“Well…”. Lucille pretended to hesitate, just to mess with him.

He tilted his head. “Please?” he asked, drawing the word out in a long wheedle.

She wanted to play it out a little longer—it was a fact of life, little sisters tormented their big brothers—but she found herself acquiescing almost immediately, because it was Jimmy and he was her hero.

“Yes. I would love to go to the garden.”

~*~

 

Jimmy was walking slowly beside her, talking about someone named Lena, and Lucille was listening, she really was, but the words came out of her mouth before she’d even realized she wanted to say them.

“You always liked riding your bicycle.”

He paused for a moment, before replying. “Well, there’s a freedom to it,” he explained. “Even once I could drive, the bike was better. I like feeling the air on my face. Moving through the world without being apart from it, you know?”

“You taught me to ride a bike,” she reminded him.

He stopped talking, his eyes focused on the path in front of him. Then he turned to her with a shrug. “Well, who else would teach you but your big brother?”

“Well, Dad, of course.” She tossed her head. “But we were determined to surprise him.”

He chuckled, then gestured at a nearby bench, tucked in among the rose bushes. “Hey, let’s sit for a while.”

Once they’d gotten seated, he said, “Didn’t you skin your knee real bad that day?”

She shuddered at the memory. “Ouch. Yes. We’d been at it, what, an hour by then? And I was hot and tired and took my hand off the handlebar to wipe my forehead, and bam! Down I went. You tried to hold the bike steady so I wouldn’t fall over, but it didn’t work.”

“You slid along the sidewalk,” he reminded her. “Shredded the skin right off a patch of your leg, right where your knee bent. And it hurt, didn’t it?”

“So much,” she recalled with a shiver.

“But you were so afraid that he would get in… that your dad would be angry. So you kept saying you were all right…”.

“But I could barely walk.” Lucille finished. “I was going to try, though. I was going to walk all the way back home and into the house. Sit down for dinner as though nothing had happened.” She shook her head at her own stubbornness. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“No one ever knew what you were thinking,” he assured her. “Trust me on that.”

He let out a laugh as she swatted at him with a playful scowl.

“Seriously, you had blood flowing down your leg, gravel stuck in your wound, and you were going to walk.”

“But you wouldn’t let me,” Lucille remembered, her gaze falling on the red and white roses close to her side of the bench. “And I argued and argued, and you finally just picked me up and carried me back home. Mom cleaned me up while you went back to get the bike, and I kept insisting that she not punish you, it was my fault, and it wouldn’t be fair if you got in trouble for it. And you didn’t.”

“Always protecting people you loved,” he murmured.

“You were so patient with me,” Lucille told him. “So patient. Kind. Protective. You were the best big brother, better than any I could ever have imagined, and I never said thank you. I never told you how grateful I was to have such a good big brother; how lucky I was. You were my hero, you know that? I wish I’d told you that, before. I wish I’d said.”

Her eyes were wet, she realized, and it puzzled her. She didn’t know why she would be sad, sitting in a garden in the sunshine like this.

He laid his hand over hers. “You’re saying it now,” he assured her. “You’re saying it now, and that’s enough.”

She could see grey streaks in his hair, now that they were in the sunlight. She’d never seen Jimmy with grey streaks before.

Once when Lucille was a girl, she’d stood on the beach and watched a storm rolling in from far out in the lake. The sky had been dark and churning, the water had been foaming, and lightning had been flickering on the horizon, accompanied by ominously low rumbles of thunder. Her skin had been practically crawling with the feeling of it.

Right now, there was something flickering at the edge of her thoughts, just like that lightning, a low and ominous idea or memory that she couldn’t quite grasp, and didn’t want to. She rubbed her arm.

“Hey.” He squeezed her hand once, then again. “Hey. Are you with me?”

She squinted against the sun. “I’m feeling a little tired now.”

“Would you like to go back?”

She nodded, and he stood, reaching out to gently help her up from the bench.

~*~

 

The days passed in fits and starts. Some days, Lucille felt like she was ticking off every minute on the clock; other days, she’d get out of bed to find that it was suddenly dark out again and time for bed.

Sometimes, she’d think it was Monday, but then come to find out it was Thursday. Lucille was sure that one day, she’d blink her eyes and it would be Christmas when she opened them.

Through it all, the people continued to come and go, with their food and their bath towels and their stethoscopes. She enjoyed her collages and she watched television and would even knit, when she realized she knew how.

She was knitting one afternoon when another knock came on the door.

“Hello. Are you up for a visit?”

The young girl was smiling, her eyebrows lifted in a question over eyes the color of milk chocolate. Her long chestnut curls flowed past her shoulders. She was easily the most beautiful girl Lucille had ever seen, and no, there was no bias in that judgment. It was just plain fact.

“Of course, sweetheart!” She set her knitting down and opened her arms for a hug. “It’s so nice to see you!”

Lucille caught a whiff of the girl’s shampoo as they hugged. It wasn’t what she had expected; Susanna had always preferred the Herbal Essences pink bottle, and Lucille had hugged her child enough to have the fragrance imprinted in her memory. This was strawberries, if she wasn’t mistaken.

“Your new shampoo smells nice, honey.”

“Thanks. It’s not new, though. It’s my same old stuff. Your hair looks good! Did you get it cut recently?”

“Yes,” Lucille said, although she didn’t quite remember. “Susie, move that book from the chair, so you can sit down.”

The girl regarded her in silence for a few seconds, then did as she was told.

Lucille chuckled as she watched. “Yours has certainly gotten long.”

“I’m trying to grow it out. You know Locks of Love? They use donated hair to make wigs for kids with cancer? I’m going to donate mine when it gets long enough.”

“How long is that?”

“They need a minimum of ten inches.”

Lucille leaned forward slightly. “It looks to me like you could do that now.”

“Yeah, but then my hair would be really short after. So, no.”

“You always did want longer hair,” Lucille mused. “I thought you would have looked so cute with a Princess Diana hairdo, but there was no convincing you.”

The girl furrowed her brows. “Wasn’t that an entire thing? The haircut battles?”

Lucille rolled her eyes. “That started when you were three. Oh, no one in the salon had ever heard such screeching! And it was just a trim! Just half an inch, no more than that. We never went back there again.”

“I feel like there was some ice cream bribery in there too.”

“Oh, yes. Well, that was your father’s idea. Make it a Girls’ Day Out, not a battle royale. Have our hair and nails done, go for ice cream, sit and talk. It took a few appointments, but you eventually stopped fighting the hairdresser and just enjoyed the day.”

Now Lucille could smell the salon again—the citrusy perfume of the stylist mixed with the floral smell of the shampoo and the sharp scent of the chemicals used for permanent waves—and she could almost see little Susanna in the chair, swinging her feet and watching herself pose in the mirror.

“It was one of my favorite things to do,” she continued. “And one time you told me that you wanted to do the same thing with your daughter.” She laughed. “You had so many ideas about your daughter! You’d picked out her name by the time you were six. Elizabeth, you said, because it was the most beautiful name ever and it belonged to the most beautiful girl. I said I thought Susanna was the most beautiful name for the most beautiful girl, but you weren’t convinced. ‘She’ll be Elizabeth, she can’t have any other name,’ you insisted. ‘And we’ll do hair days just like this, and I’ll tell her all about how I used to do them with my mommy.’”

The girl rubbed slightly at the corner of one eye and smiled. “And those are some of the best days of Elizabeth’s childhood, I promise.”

Lucille frowned, thinking hard.

“Susanna,” she mused. “There was a reason I named you Susanna, and I don’t…”.

“Wasn’t it the song?” The girl gave a small sniffle and rubbed at her nose. “You fell in love with your husband when he sang the song at a campfire, right?”

“Bonfire,” Lucille corrected automatically. “A bonfire makes anyone look handsome, of course. It was a bonfire, he had a guitar and he sang, and it made me laugh.”

“Well, it’s a silly song.”

“And he wasn’t that good a singer. I mean, I could listen to him forever, because it was him, but he didn’t sound professional by any means.”

Such a spectacular night that had been. The woodsy smoke smell of the bonfire, the warmth on her face and the chill at her back, the cold, clear stars above, and Bill, with his guitar, hamming it up like he was on Hee Haw. Kind, steady, funny Bill, calling for them all to sing along.

“Did he…”, her visitor started, but Lucille was already singing.

“Well it rained all night, the day I left,

The weather, it was dry.

The sun so hot, I froze to death,

Susanna, don’t you cry.”

Lucille barely heard as her visitor joined in the chorus. Her mind was full of Bill’s voice.

“Oh, Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me,

‘Cause I come from Alabama, with a banjo on my knee.”

 

~*~

 

She was sad, so terribly sad. It frightened her, how sad she was, and the room was dark, and she was alone and crying, lost and bereft….

Someone came into the room and flipped on the light over the bed, and it stung her half-closed eyes.

“Lucille, are you all right? Does something hurt?”

… but she had to stop crying, as awful as she felt it was worse for them, and she had to take care of them, she had to be strong because there was no one else to be strong.

“Is it your head, your stomach?” A young woman wearing a loose white shirt leaned closer to her. “You have to tell me, so I can help you. Are you in pain? Do you need the doctor?”

Doctor.

The word woke her all the way up, and she shook her head.

“No? No doctor?”

Lucille shook her head again, trying to catch her breath.

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“I don’t…I don’t know.” It had been a dream, but it also hadn’t.

There was a pause, as the woman in the white shirt thought it over.

“Can I get you anything?” Her voice was softer now, kinder. “A cup of tea, or some warm milk?”

Lucille shook her head.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

“Not you,” Lucille shook her head again. “My…my husband.”

“It’s late at night. I’m sure he’s sleeping,” the woman soothed. “But I can give him a call in the morning for you, if that’s all right?”

Lucille didn’t want to wake him up—he worked hard and needed his sleep—so she nodded.

“All right, then. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

She gave another nod.

“Shall I leave the light on?”

She’d see better, in the light, and it would be so much more stark and real. “No, please don’t”

“All right, then.” The woman reached for the light, but paused just before clicking it. “You’ll hit the button if you need me, right?” she asked.

“Yes, I will.”

The light clicked off, and the lady in white whispered. “Try to get some sleep.”

Lucille watched as the bright light from the doorway shrunk down to a thin line where the door stood slightly ajar.

The light reminded her of the grey streaks she’d seen in Jimmy’s hair, in the garden. Those streaks had been wrong, all wrong.

Jimmy couldn’t have grey streaks in his hair.

She tasted sour ice cream and salt and ashes, and she closed her eyes and cried.

 

~*~

 

The sunshine was bright and fierce, glinting off the window frames in a way that left shadows in her sight when she looked over there and looked away again. The man on the news said it was a heatwave, but the building felt like a refrigerator. When the people came to her room, she’d ask if they couldn’t do something about it, but they all said no. Something about the cooling system having to cool all areas of the building the same.

Whenever they explained it to her, Lucille understood. But she’d wake up the next day feeling ice-cold, and she’d have to ask again.

There was another collage on her wall, of lakefront scenes. There was the beach she remembered from when she was a child, and some boats in a harbor, and a skyline scene from out on the water. She knew she’d been to that city—one of the pictures, a tall building, was labeled “Your first big job”—but a lot of the buildings weren’t familiar to her.

She supposed that was because cities changed. Old buildings got torn down, and new ones were built in their places. A person couldn’t expect a city to stay the same forever. It wasn’t natural.

The people brought a cup of ice cream with her lunch. She wanted to eat it, because it reminded her of her children, but she couldn’t bring herself to take it. She could only stare at it, her chest and throat aching.

There was a quick patter of raps on the door—shave and a haircut—and she automatically mouthed the words two bits as her visitor said, “May I come in?”

She looked up at the sound of the voice. “Bill.”

His voice was warm with relief. “Hi, Lu.”

He leaned down to kiss her cheek, handing her a bouquet of flowers as he stood back up.

“I hope those will do.” He pulled a chair from up against the wall, dragging it over to sit beside her. “I can call someone to put them in water.”

Lucille didn’t look at her flowers; she was staring at the ice cream cup.

“I told him not to go,” she said.

Bill regarded her for a quiet second or two. “Who, honey?”

“He took me for ice cream, just like any other time,” she continued, “and I knew, I knew something was up, because he was kind of quiet and jumpy.”

“Ah.” Bill put a hand on the arm of her chair.

“He told me he was enlisting, because he wouldn’t have a student deferment and they were going to get him eventually anyway. He wanted to do it on his terms.”

“He did everything on his terms. The both of you did,” her husband recalled fondly.

“And I told him not to go.” Lucille’s voice grew bright and fierce. “I told him to find a way to go to school anyway. Or go to Canada. Or get himself injured. I said, there’s a million ways to stay here, if you try, if you really try. I offered to break his arm for him, or say he was mentally unfit. I talked and talked and talked, and it didn’t change anything. He waited for me to stop talking, and then he told me again.”

“I tried too,” Bill commiserated. “Every way I knew how. But he took it seriously, service and duty.”

“He told me he’d only be gone for two years. Two years. He promised.” The ice cream cup was blurring in her vision. “I was crying and angry and rude to him, and I told him not to go. But he went anyway, and then he didn’t come back.”

Bill took her free hand and held it tight, his hands still so warm and strong.

“I still miss him, every day,” he confessed. “Never had another friend like him. He was the most stand-up guy I ever met. I could never figure out why he picked a hare-brained ne’er-do-well like me as his best friend.”

“You’re smart, not hare-brained. And you weren’t a ne-er-do-well, either, just frivolous and maybe a little careless, but a good heart.” She nodded decisively. “That’s why.”

“I wonder what he’d be doing now, you know? Where would he live? Would he have kids?” He gave a dry chuckle. “Would he have socked me in the jaw for falling in love with his kid sister?”

“I’m not a kid,” Lucille retorted.

“You were, though,” he reminded her.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You were fifteen when he…well, not that it mattered, because you hated me anyway.”

Lucille was incredulous. “I never hated you.”

“Oh, yes, you did.”

“Why in the world would I have hated you?”

“Because I went to school, and I lived, and he didn’t,” he said bluntly. “You told me that, Lu. Point blank. Standing at his grave, in the cemetery.”

The vibrant, green smell of freshly cut grass. The hum of a lawnmower. Her hair laying damply against her cheek, wild in the humid heat. How her fingers had itched to dig down into the dirt and scrabble through it until she could find her big brother, her hero, and pull him back up to life again. The raw, slicing grief, still bringing her to her knees even after two whole years.

And then Bill was there, stepping out of his car, intruding on her precious time with her brother. Bill, who had taken to showing up at the house on school breaks to help her dad out with repairs or do some shopping for her mom.

Someone as thoughtless as him could never replace Jimmy.

Lucille had been shocked by the stark, wide-eyed pain on his face when she’d said what she’d said. The grief in his voice as he’d whispered his response: “I loved him, too. He was the best friend I ever had, and I’m trying so hard every day to be better, for him.”

She’d watched him stumble back to his car, wanting to stop him and apologize, but unable to move.

“So many things changed, after that,” she murmured. “Everything changed.”

Bill brought her hand up to press his lips against it. “Well, you didn’t hate me anymore, that’s for sure.”

“I suppose I didn’t.” Her gaze fell on the cup of ice cream. “I was so mad at him, for telling me during ice cream. I loved going for ice cream, and then I couldn’t, ever again.”

“But you did,” he reminded her. “Once you had the children.”

“Well, for the kids,” she shrugged. “That was different.”

He gave her hand another kiss. “You haven’t talked about Jimmy in years, honey. What brought this up?”

“He has grey hair.”

He wrinkled his brow in confusion. “Who?”

“Jimmy.”

“Oh. You mean, our James. Did he come for a visit?”

She nodded. “And Susie came too. Not the same day, though.”

He regarded her skeptically. “I don’t think so, hon. Suse has been in California the last couple of weeks, teaching her seminar.”

“No, she was here,” Lucille insisted. “We talked about Girls’ Day out. Remember Girls’ Day Out?”

“Oh, thank God for Girls’ Day Out,” he said fervently. “You were both impossible to live with on haircut days before that.”

“Her hair is very long now,” she informed him. “She’s going to make children’s wigs out of it.”

“What?” Understanding dawned on his face. “Honey, that was Bethie.”

“No,” Lucille argued. “It was Susie. I know my own daughter.”

“Lu.”

“It was Susie.”

He sighed and pressed his lips to her hand again. “How about I get you some water for those flowers?”

She’d forgotten all about the flowers she was holding. “Oh! Yes.”

As he left the room, she examined her bouquet.

“Camellia,” she murmured. “Gladiolus. Heliotrope. Daisy. Forget-Me-Not. Honeysuckle.”

She buried her face in the bouquet and inhaled, pulling the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle into her lungs.

~*~

 

Lucille was knitting in her room, when she heard footsteps just outside the door.

A teenaged boy stood on the threshold, regarding her curiously.

“Well, hello, young man.” Lucille smiled. “Are you lost?”

“What? Oh. No, I’m not.”

“Well, that’s good. Are you a Boy Scout?”

His eyebrows furrowed. “Uh, no. Oh, sorry,” he caught himself. “No, ma’am.”

“You’re very polite. Your parents must be proud.”

He ducked his head a little, his cheeks flushing pink. “Hope so.”

“I thought maybe you were here to do volunteer work. The Boy Scouts do that. They come out and talk to us, or work in the gardens. One boy did a whole project here, with us. Can’t remember what it was, just now.”

“I’m here to see my grandma.”

“Oh, how nice.” Lucille beamed. “You must love her very much.”

“I do,” he nodded, stepping into the room. “I like your pictures.” He pointed to the wall. “I make those for my grandma, too.”

“I’m sure they make her very happy. It’s so nice to have some color and shapes in the room, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. More personal.”

“Exactly.”

He was a smart young man, this one, and obviously good-hearted. Lucille could tell, just by looking at him.

“Do you live near here?”

“Yep. In town, anyway.” He took a seat, perching on the edge of the chair. “Actually, I just got my driver’s license, so my dad let me drive over here all by myself.”

“How nice.”

“I wanted to show my grandma my driver’s license. It’s kind of a big deal, you know, and I thought she’d like to see it.” He hesitated. “Actually, can I show it to you?”

“Of course!” He was obviously very proud of his step towards adulthood. Lucille felt honored that he wanted to share it with her.

He pulled it from his wallet and handed it to her with an eager smile.

“Connor Carrollton.” She pronounced his name as if it were a royal title. “Oh, that’ s a nice picture. Usually the picture isn’t all that good, but this one makes you look very distinguished.”

“I know, right?”

She handed the license back to him, and he tucked it away with a sigh of satisfaction

“Are you close to your grandmother, Connor?”

“Pretty much. I mean, we live close to them, so I saw her, like, all the time when I was a kid. Soccer games, school concerts, all that stuff. She came over on Friday afternoons to hang out with my mom, and then Grandpa would come after work and we’d have dinner together.”

“Every Friday,” Lucille marveled.

“Yeah. Thursday was their day with my uncle’s family, Friday was our turn. And sometimes I’d go home with them, after, for a sleepover weekend.”

Lucille had done this with her grandchildren too, she thought, but a very long time ago. “Did she make you breakfast in bed?”

“Yeah! Her and grandpa’s bed, though. I would get up and run down the hall to their room and jump into the bed with them, and we’d talk and read a story or two, and then she’d go make some pancakes and bacon and bring them up on a tray, and we’d all sit and eat together.”

“Pancakes in bed?” Lucille giggled. “Didn’t you spill the syrup on the sheets?”

“I guess we did,” he allowed. “But Grandpa spilled more than I did, so they couldn’t be mad about it. And then we’d hang out together, and I’d work with Grandpa with his train set, or go out to the garden and help Grandma with her plants. She grew all kinds of vegetables and flowers and stuff. At night, I’d take a bubble bath, and then Grandpa would make popcorn and we’d watch movies of when my mom and uncle were little.”

“That sounds lovely,” Lucille said, trying not to sound as wistful as she felt. She missed those days with her grandchildren, when they were little and silly and smelled of sunscreen and chocolate and Mr. Bubble.

She’d kept the Mr. Bubble in her linen closet, because neither she nor Bill took bubble baths, and the fragrance of it had remained in there long after the grandchildren had stopped sleeping over.

She’d been sad when that day had come, but she knew it was natural for them to want to spend weekends with their friends instead of their grandparents. After all, a person couldn’t remain a child forever. Sometimes, when she missed those days too much, she’d open her linen closet, just for the faint scent of bubble bath, and it would make her heart feel warm and cozy.

“I wish I could do it again,” Connor confessed. “But she lives here now, so…”. He shrugged.

“Well, you’ll always have those times with her, you know,” Lucille assured him. “You’ll always have those memories, and so will she.”

He gazed at her for a few seconds before responding. “Yes, ma’am. I believe that.”

“Well, I shouldn’t keep you from your grandmother, I’m sure she’s waiting for you.”

‘Yeah.” He stood up. “Thanks for the conversation.”

“And thank you. You’re a good boy, Connor Carrollton, and I’m sure you’ll grow into a good man, too. It was a pleasure to meet you.” Lucille held out her hand, and he gave her a firm handshake. “Next time you’re visiting your grandma, pop in and say hi.”

“I will.” He gave her a single nod, and it reminded her so much of someone. She couldn’t remember who. “I look forward to it.”

She was so busy trying to remember where she’d seen a nod like that before, that she didn’t notice that he had left.

She thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, but wouldn’t you know, it was when she stopped thinking about it that she remembered.

That single nod was something that Bill and Jimmy used to do, when they were kids. Well, when she was a kid, anyway. A single nod that showed they were serious about what they were saying, a single nod that meant something definite.

That single nod had always made her feel safe and steady, secure in the knowledge that they intended to do whatever they’d promised to do.

Yes, Connor Carrollton was indeed a fine young man. She hoped she’d get to talk to him again sometime.

It was nice to have people coming to see her, even if they were strangers. It was nice to hear stories about their lives, nice to be reminded of the good things she’d had in her life.

And she’d had a lot of good things, hadn’t she? She’d had bad things too, but really, it was the good things she liked thinking about.

Bill and his guitar, Susanna and her haircuts, James on his bike, grandchildren laughing in a tub full of water and bubbles.

And Jimmy, her hero, with his steady, stand-up nod.

So many good things she remembered, and so many more she hadn’t remembered yet.

Lucille looked forward to more people coming to see her.

She looked forward to it, very much.