The radio stayed on because the quiet in the house had teeth.
I bought a bag of navel oranges at the Piggly Wiggly on Thursday because old habits are harder to break than dishes, and by Sunday morning three of them were already soft on the laminate counter. They had that dull, heavy give when you pressed your thumb against the rind, the kind that means the juice inside is starting to turn sour and dry.
For fifty-two years, I never touched the skin of a citrus fruit. Arthur took care of that part the way some men take care of the car battery or the storm windows. He would sit at the small oak table by the window, pull his pocket knife from his trousers, score the skin in four neat quarters, and peel back the white pith until the fruit sat naked and perfect in his palm. Then he would hand me the pieces one at a time across the oilcloth.
I used to tell him I had two good hands and could manage it myself. He would just smile, his thumb stained pale orange, and keep right on peeling.
When he passed away in April, the house shrank down until the walls felt like they were pressing against my collarbones. My daughter Clara came by every afternoon with casseroles I mostly forgot to eat, and she tried to talk me into coming over to her place in town, but I couldn’t leave the porch.
Arthur’s winter coat was still hanging by the back door, smelling faintly of cedar shavings and tobacco, and moving it felt like tearing down a wall while the roof was still on. I stopped answering the telephone after the second week because people kept telling me time heals things, which is about the most useless thing you can say to an eighty-year-old widow who spent half a century waking up to the smell of coffee and freshly peeled fruit.
So I left the kitchen radio tuned to the local AM station playing those old hymns and farm reports, just so there was a human voice rattling around the linoleum.
The screen door banged around 8:15 this morning. That was the first sign something was different, because Clara usually calls before she drives out from the highway. Instead, I heard small, fast boots hitting the porch boards, and then the inner door flew open without even a knock.
“Grandma?”
It was little Lily. She is four now, with hair the color of unspun wool and knees that are always scuffed from gravel driveways. She didn’t wait for me to answer from the sink. She marched straight through the dining room, dragging her pink cardigan behind her on the floor, and headed directly for the corner of the kitchen where Arthur’s heavy oak armchair had sat empty for four months.
I turned down the radio. The sudden drop in volume made the room feel terribly loud.
Lily didn’t ask to get up. She just grabbed the armrest with both hands, hooked the toe of her sneaker into the rung of the chair, and hauled herself up until she was kneeling on the red vinyl cushion. That chair was built heavy enough for a grown man, and seeing her small shoulders barely reach the top of the backrest made my throat tighten up so hard I couldn’t swallow.
On the counter right beside her elbow sat the bowl of rotting oranges.
She reached out a small, grubby hand, picked up one of the heavy navels, and jammed her thumbnail right into the navel end. She didn’t have Arthur’s knife, and she certainly didn’t have his patience. She tore into the skin with all four fingers, ripping away ragged chunks of bright peel and scattering white pith across the oilcloth. Juice sprayed in a tiny arc, catching the edge of my coffee mug.
I opened my mouth to tell her she was making a mess, but the words got stuck somewhere behind my ribs.
She didn’t look at me while she worked. She just concentrated with the fierce, terrible focus of a child building a block tower, her tongue poking out just past her lip until she managed to break off one thick, mangled wedge dripping with pulp. Without a word of warning, she leaned across the table, thrust the sticky piece right into my space, and held it out on the flat of her palm.
She said, “Grandpa said it’s my job now.”
I just stood there with my dish towel halfway wrung out, the water dripping off my knuckles into the porcelain sink. My brain kind of stopped working for a second, the way it does when you step out onto the porch in January and realize you forgot your coat.
I asked when he ever told her that.
She didn’t hesitate. “In the sunroom. When the snow was on the glass. He gave me the little box.”
The sunroom was where Arthur spent his final weeks in February when the stairs got to be too much for his chest. He would sit in the wicker lounger with a heavy wool blanket over his knees while Clara brought him his broth and medicine. I never thought much about Lily being in there with him, because she was always dragging her dolls around wherever the family gathered, and Arthur loved having her chatter while he worked the crossword puzzle in the local paper.
I walked over from the sink, my slippers shuffling against the linoleum. “What box, honey?”
Lily didn’t answer right away. She shoved the remaining half of the ruined orange back into the bowl and hopped down off the chair with a heavy thud. She trotted over to the sideboard against the wall, the old walnut one we bought at the church auction back in sixty-four, and pulled on the small brass handle of the bottom drawer. It always stuck a little on the left side because the house had settled over the winters, but she knew just how to jerk it.
“The one with the shiny handle,” she said, tugging until the drawer slid open with a dry screech.
She reached her arm all the way to the back, past the spare set of linen napkins and the box of birthday candles we hadn’t used since Clara turned thirty, and pulled out a small cedar box with a brass latch. It was the one Arthur kept his spare tackle hooks and pocket watch parts in before his hands got too shaky to tie a fly.
She set it right on the center of the kitchen table, right next to the bowl of rotting fruit.
“He said don’t open it until the kitchen got too quiet,” Lily said, her voice dropping into that serious imitation of an adult she used when she was playing church. “He said you’d know when.”
I sat down in Arthur’s chair. The cushion still had the faint dip where he used to lean his left hip, and for half a second I could swear I smelled his Woolite soap and peppermint lozenges. My hands were shaking so badly I missed the brass latch twice before my thumbnail finally caught it.
Inside wasn’t fishing tackle.
There was Arthur’s old yellow-handled Case pocket knife, closed tight with the brass bolster gleaming clean. Next to it lay a folded square of lined notebook paper with my name written across the front in his slow, heavy handwriting, the letters leaning back toward the left because his fingers had stiffened up back during the Carter administration.
I didn’t want to open it. I wanted to close the lid and push the box back into the dark where the napkins were, because reading a dead man’s handwriting is like letting someone turn the lights on in a room you’ve been keeping boarded up.
“Go on, Grandma,” Lily whispered, leaning her elbows on the edge of the table and kicking her heels against the chair rungs. “He said you have to read it out loud.”
I unfolded the paper. The blue ink was a little faded around the fold where he must have creased it a dozen times while he sat alone in the sunroom waiting for the nurses to come change his sheets.
*Clara girl,* it began, he always called me Clara when we were alone, though my name was Martha, because he said Clara sounded softer when he was tired. *If you’re reading this, the radio is probably on too loud and those store-bought oranges are sitting there getting soft because you won’t let yourself touch them.*
I stopped reading for a second and looked up at the window. The morning light was coming through the clean glass, hitting the side of the flour canister just the way it had every April for thirty years.
*I taught Lily how to score the skin back in February when the wind was howling through the screen door,* the letter went on, the pencil strokes getting a little shaky near the bottom. *She’s clumsy at it, and she’ll probably ruin half the fruit on the first try, but she’s got good hands. Better than mine were at the end. Don’t you sit there in that kitchen by yourself wishing for things you can’t change. Eat the orange, Martha. Let the girl do her job.*
The last line didn’t have any punctuation at all, just a long trailing stroke where his pen must have slipped against the wood of the armrest.
I folded the paper back up along the original crease, my thumb pressing hard against the crease until the paper went white.
Lily was still watching me, her little chin propped on her hands, waiting for her instructions. She didn’t look sad. She looked like she had a very important job to do and wanted to make sure she passed inspection.
I reached out across the oilcloth and picked up the mangled, juice-soaked piece of orange she had handed me three minutes ago. It wasn’t pretty. The white pith was still clinging to the side in ugly little tufts, and a stray seed was stuck right in the middle of the pulp.
I put it in my mouth and bit down. It was sour, and the skin had a bitter taste of green oil that Arthur never would have allowed on my plate, but it tasted like morning anyway.
I reached over and hit the toggle switch on the radio by the flour bin. The AM preacher faded out in the middle of a sentence, and the sudden silence that rushed in to fill the room didn’t feel like it had teeth anymore.
“Well,” I said, wiping my thumb on my apron and pulling the bowl of fruit a little closer to the center of the table. “You missed a spot on that one. Give me the knife.”
