Sometimes Margaret listened.
Sometimes she slept.
On the final afternoon, Daniel was sitting beside his mother, rubbing lotion into her hands because the skin had become painfully dry.
Margaret opened her eyes.
For a moment, she studied his face.
“Daniel?”
He leaned closer.
“I’m here, Mum.”
She looked at him with an expression of quiet concentration.
“You mustn’t work so hard.”
He smiled, though his eyes had filled with tears.
“I’ll try.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Margaret closed her eyes again.
Daniel continued holding her hand long after she had fallen asleep.
She died just before dawn.
At the funeral, Eleanor spoke about her grandmother’s garden, her terrible singing, the way she saved wrapping paper, and her habit of sending birthday cards with five-dollar bills tucked inside, even after Eleanor had begun earning a salary.
She did not speak about the disease.
It had occupied enough of Margaret’s final years without being allowed to define the whole of her life.
After the service, relatives gathered at the Whitmore house.
There were casseroles, flowers, condolences, and conversations that gradually became less formal as people remembered stories they had not told in years.
By evening, everyone had gone.
Eleanor found her father in the dining room.
He was standing beside the table, holding five dinner plates.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Me neither.”
He looked at the plates.
“I keep thinking she’ll come downstairs and ask why we haven’t eaten.”
Eleanor moved beside him.
For years, she had thought of her father as a man who could repair almost anything. He had fixed leaking pipes, broken furniture, damaged engines, and every childhood disaster she had brought to him.
Now he stood in the room where his mother had served thousands of meals, unable to decide what to do with a stack of plates.
Eleanor took them gently from his hands.
“Sit down, Dad.”
He obeyed.
She went into the kitchen and warmed two portions of casserole left by a neighbor. She cut bread, filled two glasses of water, and carried everything to the dining room.
Then she opened the cupboard.
For a moment, she considered taking out a third plate.
Instead, she found the old blue-and-white serving dish Margaret had used every Sunday.
She placed it in the middle of the table and filled it with sliced peaches.
Daniel looked at the dish.
“Your grandmother always bought those for you.”
“I know.”
“Even when they were out of season. She’d complain about the price all the way home.”
Eleanor sat opposite him.
“She wrote it down so she wouldn’t forget.”
Daniel nodded.
They ate slowly.
At one point, Eleanor asked him whether he remembered the Christmas when Margaret had accidentally put salt instead of sugar into the apple pie.
