7

Mrs. Asher

DOLORES ASHER GLANCED AT THE CHART THE ATTENDING DOCTOR had just placed at the foot of the newest patient’s bed.

Name: UNKNOWN

Age: UNKNOWN

Talent: UNKNOWN

Gender: FEMALE

“Isn’t that just the saddest thing?” a nurse asked, noticing Dolores’s gaze. “She had a stroke, poor dear, and can’t speak a word. She won’t even have a place to stay when she gets out of here, if no family or friends come to claim her.”

Dolores plucked a cozy purple shawl from the pile of knits she’d brought in. “May I?” she asked the nurse, then reached to drape the shawl across the patient’s shoulders. The woman was lost in a fretful sleep. What a lot of stories she must have to tell, Dolores thought, and who knows if she’ll ever be able to tell them?

“Oh, careful there, honey,” the nurse exclaimed, throwing a protective arm over Dolores’s head to block her from a nearby IV stand. Dolores heard a soft clack as something dropped to the floor. “Your hairpin,” the nurse told her, snatching up the object.

“Thank you so much,” Dolores replied, taking the hairpin from the nurse. She whisked her limp brown curls off her shoulders and wound them quickly into a bun, exactly the way she’d done every morning for the past eleven years. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost this thing.” She pierced her mound of hair with the pointier end of the hairpin. It was an unusual piece of decoration, that was for sure—beige and cracked and knobby, as wide as a rib of celery and as long as a pencil. (“It looks like someone dug it out of the dirt!” Will had once exclaimed. And indeed it did.)

“Thanks again for the blankets and things,” the nurse told her. “You’re so lucky to have a Talent you enjoy. Could’ve been stuck with plant-watering like me.” She laughed.

Dolores nodded and smiled, because it was the sort of thing a person nodded and smiled at. But the truth was, there were times Dolores didn’t feel quite so lucky. There were times when she found herself thinking longingly of the days before three kids and her own yarn shop, when she’d worked at the Poughkeepsie Museum of Natural Sciences on a scholarship for Fair students. Dolores adjusted her hairpin slightly and glanced at the woman’s chart again.

 

Talent: UNKNOWN

Sometimes that didn’t seem so terrible.

* * * 

As Dolores slid into her car, she spied the papers strewn across the passenger’s seat, the mail she’d grabbed from the box on her way out of the apartment. There was one envelope that seemed to be screaming to be opened. MCDERMOTT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, printed in the upper left corner in fat red letters. Dolores had a sinking suspicion that whatever was in that envelope was not going to make her happy.

Dolores slammed her door shut. Best to head home and worry about unpleasant letters later. She’d been away long enough, and there was a good chance that Will was lost in the apartment walls by now.

She drove off into the fog.