There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Twenty-six


Long after the girl had gone, Mina could feel Evie’s strong arms around her and a faint fruity smell that Mina finally placed. Raspberry.

It had been a while since Mina had been properly hugged. Not since her sister. Mina sat at the kitchen table as memories flooded back. She and Annabelle, young, walking arm in arm to Sparkles. Annabelle supporting her in the shallows, helping her learn to float on her back. Buttoning the long row of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on the back of Annabelle’s wedding dress.

Their last embrace might have been one of the last times that Mina visited Annabelle in the nursing home, a few weeks before her sister slipped into a coma and was moved to the hospital where Mina had promised her she’d never end up.

Mina had arrived that day and found Annabelle parked in the corridor outside her room, hunched over a locked-in tray-table in what the nurses called a geri-chair. Asleep? Mina couldn’t be sure.

Her sister’s once lustrous auburn hair, now white and wispy, was neatly pulled back into a bun at her neck. Her eyeglasses were anchored with a band that went around her head. The blouse and pants Mina had bought for her a few weeks earlier were already swimming on her.

When she’d stepped closer, she heard Annabelle muttering. She had to stoop to make out the words. “Don’t say that.” A pause. “You already . . . had your chance.” The words came out in short intense spurts, on puffs of breaths like Annabelle was trying to blow out a match. “You just be quiet.”

“Hello, dear,” Mina said, laying her hand gently on her sister’s arm. She kissed the top of her head and breathed in shampoo scent. Even if the staff couldn’t keep Annabelle from sliding into oblivion, at least the attention to hygiene was excellent.

Annabelle lifted her head and blinked, an unfocused look in her eyes, then coughed weakly. Mina could hear her labored breathing. Pneumonia and heart failure would eventually be the official cause of death.

Mina lifted her sister’s hand and pressed it against her own cheek. “Hello, Annabelle.”

Finally her sister’s gaze connected with hers. “Hello, dearest,” Annabelle said. The flicker of recognition was still there, thank God. That sweet smile. Then Annabelle raised her arms and gave Mina what she didn’t know would be her last hug.

“Who were you talking to?” Mina had asked.

“Talking to talking to talking . . .” Annabelle gave a vague wave of the hand. Her once long, tapered fingers were knotted with arthritis, the way that Mina’s were becoming. “Friends.” Annabelle blinked twice, her gaze wandering until it anchored once again on Mina. “Imaginary friends.”

“You know they’re not real,” Mina said.

“I know, I know.” Annabelle put a finger to her lips, shhh, and added in a stage whisper. “But they don’t.”

Mina had laughed, and then stopped laughing because it was clear that Annabelle didn’t get her own joke, and she wasn’t about to start laughing at her sister. Not then. Not ever.

Later, after Annabelle was back in bed, Brian had arrived at the nursing home. “Hello, Mother,” he’d said, standing in the doorway like a cigar store Indian.

“Hello, Gilbert,” Annabelle had said. She raised her eyebrows in Brian’s direction and asked Mina, “Is he imaginary, too?”

Fortunately Brian never heard that. He wouldn’t have found the comment amusing, not the slightest bit.

He came over to the bed and kissed Annabelle’s cheek.

Every once in a while, even then near the end, Annabelle had surprised Mina, as she did at that moment when her gaze sharpened. “Oh!” She pursed her lips, tilted her head, and narrowed her eyes. Then she licked her thumb and wiped his cheek. Annabelle never had been much of a doting mother, but she had liked her things spotless.

Brian had drawn back. “Mother, please.”

The familiar sound of her car engine turning over brought Mina back to the present. Apparently Evie needed to borrow her car after all.

Mina remembered the chicken she’d thawed. Chicken cacciatore was a simple recipe. Chicken, chopped green and sweet red pepper, a can of Hunt’s tomato sauce, plus an onion, which Mina left out. These days, onions of any kind gave her heartburn. She hoped the chicken, having been thawed and then refrigerated, wasn’t going to kill her.

A short time later Mina had put together the ingredients. She set the lid on the pot and turned the burner low to simmer. She could leave it there for hours because she liked her chicken well cooked, to the point where the meat was falling off the bone. With rice and a green salad, she’d have dinner for at least four nights.

Before she sat down again with the paper, she pulled her calendar from the kitchen wall. Three baby burrowing owls were pictured for May—not anything she was likely to see out her window. She wrote BRIAN in Monday’s block. She could hardly forget the reason he was coming back.

Annabelle’s had been a slow decline. In the early days, she’d felt her marbles slipping away. Then, even those were gone. If Mina hadn’t been there, she’d have forgotten to eat. Forgotten to clean herself. Eventually she completely lost track of what she’d lost track of.

Mina was determined not to let her present slip away. In today’s box in tiny printing she started a list.

1. Burned teakettle

2. Purse + oatmeal in icebox

3. Lost legal papers

4. Set off C’s alarm

To the last item she added a question: For the third time?