I am so sorry…
And on the second, which was to be the inside of the card:
All losses are so hard to bear, but the loss of former love can be the hardest. Regardless of the reasons, there was love. And my heart and thoughts are with you at this difficult time.
“Too much?” she said as I looked down at the bottom of the page, where Mira’s Miracles was written in small print, with tiny red hearts topping both i’s
“Urn, no,” I said. “I just never saw a card that specific before.”
“It’s the new wave,” she said simply, pulling a pen out of her hair. “Specialized condolence cards for new occasions. Dead ex-husbands, dead bosses, dead mailmen …”
I looked at her.
“I’m serious!” she said, spinning around in her chair and reaching for a box behind her. “Here it is!” She produced a card and cleared her throat. “The outside says, I considered him a friend.... And when you open it up, it reads, Sometimes a service can become more than just routine, when it is delivered with heart and humor and personal care. I considered him to be my friend and I will miss so much our daily contact.” She looked at me, grinning. “See what I mean?”
“You give that to your mailman?” I said.
“To your mailman’s widow,” she corrected me, chucking the card back into the box. “I have them for everything, every profession. You have to. People’s lives are very specialized now. Their cards need to be, too.”
“I don’t know if I’d buy a card for my mailman’s widow.”
“You might not,” she said seriously. “But you are probably not a card person. Some people just need to give cards. And they’re the ones that keep me in business.”
I looked at the shelves against the back wall, all of them stacked with boxes and boxes of cards. “Did you do all of these?”
“Yep. I’ve done about two or three a week since art school.” She gestured towards them. “I mean, I have cards here from ten, fifteen years back.”
“Do you only do death cards?” I asked her.
“Well, I started out with the standard line,” she said, straightening a can of pens on her desk. “Birthdays, valentines, et cetera. But then I hit big in the eighties with NonniCards.”
“Wait,” I said suddenly. “I know that name.”
She smiled, reaching under her desk and coming up with another card. “Yep, she was the motherlode. Nonni made me my name in this business.”
I immediately recognized the little girl in a sailor suit and her mother’s high-heeled shoes. She’d been a greeting card star, the next big wave after Garfield the cat. I could remember begging my mother for a Nonni doll at a gas station once when I knew we couldn’t afford it.
“Oh my God,” I said, looking up at Mira. “I never knew she was yours.”
“Yep,” she said, smiling fondly at the card. “She had her run. Then, after all the hype, I was really in the mood to focus on something different. And condolences just interested me. They’d hardly been explored.”
I was staring all the time at all those boxes, shelves upon shelves. A lifetime of death. “Do you ever run out of ideas?”
“Not really,” she said, her slippered feet, blue and fuzzy, dangling above the floor. “You’d be amazed how many ways there are to say you’re sorry in the world. I haven’t even begun to discover them all.”
“Still,” I said. “That’s a lot of dead mailmen.”
She looked surprised, her eyes wide. Then she laughed, one single burst of “Ha!” A pen fell out of her hair, clattering to the floor. She ignored it. “I guess you’re right,” she said, looking up at the shelves again. “It sure is.”
Cat Norman dragged himself up on the windowsill, settling his girth along its narrow width. Outside, Mira’s collection of birdfeeders was swinging in the wind, several birds perched on each. Cat Norman lifted one paw and tapped the glass. Then he yawned and closed his eyes in the sun.
“So,” Mira said to me. “It’s your first day. You should go exploring, check out the town or something.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, just as the front door slammed.
“It’s me,” someone called out.
“Norman Norman,” Mira called back. “We’re in here.”
Norman poked his head in, looked around, and stepped inside. He was barefoot, in jeans and a green T-shirt with a pair of red, square-framed sunglasses hooked over the collar. His hair, just to his shoulders, wasn’t long enough to be truly hippie-annoying, but it was close.
“So, Norman,” Mira said, uncapping another pen and outlining a tree on a new piece of paper, “any decent finds this morning?”
He grinned. “Oh, man. It was a good day. I got four more ashtrays for that sculpture--one’s a souvenir from Niagara Falls-- and an old blender, plus a whole boxful of bicycle gears.”
I knew it, I thought. Art freak.
“Wow,” Mira said, pulling a pen out of her hair. “No sunglasses?”
“Three pairs,” Norman said. “One with purple lenses.”
“It was a good day,” she said. To me she added, “Norman and I are into yard sales. I’ve furnished practically this whole house with secondhand stuff.”
“Really,” I said, eyeing the cracked fishtank.
“Oh, sure,” she said, not noticing. “You’d be amazed at what some people will throw away! Now, if I just had time to fix everything, I’d be all set.”
Norman picked up a sketch, glanced at it, then put it back down on the table. “I saw Bea Williamson this morning,” he said in a low voice. “Lurking about looking for cut glass.”
“Oh, of course,” Mira said with a sigh. “Did she have it with her?”
Norman nodded solemnly. “Yep. I swear, I think it’s almost gotten … bigger.”
Mira shook her head. “Not possible.”
“I’m serious,” Norman said. “It’s way big.”
I kept waiting for someone to expand on this, but since neither of them seemed about to, I asked, “What are you talking about?”
They looked at each other. Then, Mira took a breath. “Bea Williamson’s baby,” she said quietly, as if someone could hear us, “has the biggest head you have ever seen.”
Norman nodded, seconding this.