“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” – Romans 12:15, KJV
The Chair Beside Louise
Helen was halfway through pinning a paper crown onto Louise’s white hair when Louise asked, “Could we take all this down?”
The dining room at Maple Grove Apartments smelled of coffee and grocery-store cake. Eighty candles would never fit, so Helen had bought two gold numbers instead.
“You haven’t even seen what we brought you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Helen lowered her hands.
At seventy-three, she organized birthdays for the residents of their senior apartment building in Topeka. She remembered favorite cakes, found rides for people who needed them, and washed the good tablecloth herself.
Louise had moved in six months earlier. She attended their Tuesday Bible study but always left before coffee.
Helen had decided that turning eighty deserved more than another afternoon alone.
Now twelve neighbors were waiting upstairs for the three o’clock celebration.
“People went to some trouble,” Helen said.
Louise looked at the cake.
“I didn’t ask them to.”
The words stung. Helen gathered the unused napkins into a neat stack.
Then Louise reached into her cardigan pocket and brought out a birthday card, softened along its fold.
“My sister sent this for my seventy-ninth. We always called each other before breakfast.”
Helen remembered the two names Louise had written on the birthday calendar. Same date. She had assumed it was a mistake.
“You were twins?”
Louise nodded.
Helen’s phone buzzed. Someone upstairs wanted to know whether it was time to come down.
She could send everyone away. She could persuade Louise to endure twenty minutes of kindness. Neither seemed quite right now.
She set the paper crown beside the cake and pulled out a chair.
Louise touched her sleeve.
“Before you invite them in, would you let me tell you about my sister?”
What She’d Been Saving It For
Helen put her phone face-down on the table.
The buzzing stopped. Upstairs, Jean Kowalski and her husband Bill were probably standing next to the folding table with the plastic cloth, checking the doorway every thirty seconds. Jean would wait.
“Go ahead,” Helen said.
Louise smoothed the card against her knee. The envelope was gone. Just the card itself, a watercolor pansy on the front, the kind you find in racks by the pharmacy. Soft along its crease from being folded and refolded many times. Louise didn’t open it yet.
“Her name was Vera.”
Helen nodded.
“We were born April 10th, 1945. In Wichita. There were two of us before my parents even knew what to do with one.”
A small sound that might have been a laugh. Louise looked at the cake. The gold 8 and the gold 0. The white frosting with the little yellow flowers Helen had special-ordered because she’d once overheard Louise mention, offhand, that pansies were her mother’s favorite.
Louise noticed. Her eyes moved over the cake and then away. She didn’t say anything about it.
Two Girls from Wichita
Their father worked for the railroad. Their mother did everything else. Four kids in a house with one bathroom, and then twins at the end of it, which their mother apparently handled by going quiet for about three days and then getting back to work.
“She never complained,” Louise said. “Not once. I used to think that was strength. Now I think she just ran out of room for it.”
Vera and Louise shared a bed until they were eleven, shared a room until they left for college. Louise to Kansas State, Vera to the nursing school in Kansas City. They married different men, moved to different towns. Louise ended up in Topeka. Vera in Jefferson City, Missouri.
“But every morning,” Louise said. “Before anything else. Before coffee, before she went on shift, before the kids were up. The phone rang.”
Fifty-eight years of that.
Helen was quiet. She thought about her own mornings. The coffee, the news, the quiet. She’d lived alone for eleven years. She’d never thought of it as missing something specific. Just as the shape of things.
“What did you talk about?”
Louise considered.
“Weather. What we’d dreamed. Whether our knees hurt. The news if it was bad enough. Mostly nothing.”
Mostly nothing.
For fifty-eight years.
“Last year,” Louise said. “For our seventy-ninth. She sent me this.”
She opened the card.
The Morning It Mailed
Vera had sent it from Jefferson City on a Tuesday, three days before their birthday. Louise knew the post office Vera used – the one on Missouri Boulevard, near the Dairy Queen where they’d stopped on a road trip in 1987. She could picture Vera filling out the envelope at the kitchen counter because Vera had never owned a proper desk.
The call that morning had been the same as any other morning. Vera’s knee was worse. She’d seen a cardinal at the feeder. She was going to try a soup recipe one of the nurses had passed along.
“She sounded good,” Louise said. “Better than she had in months.”
That afternoon Vera had a stroke.
She was gone before the ambulance reached St. Mary’s. Louise didn’t know until Vera’s daughter Carol called that evening, voice already flat with the work of it. By the time Louise arranged a ride to Jefferson City, the funeral was planned and the viewing was scheduled. Carol was practical. She moved through grief by doing the next thing and the next, without stopping. Louise didn’t hold it against her. She understood it completely.
But she’d missed it.
Vera’s birthday card arrived three days after the funeral, forwarded from Louise’s old address.
What Vera Wrote
Helen hadn’t moved. Her coffee was cold. She didn’t reach for it.
Louise turned the card so Helen could read it.
The handwriting was large and slightly uneven. A purple pen. Old hands that had still pressed firmly.
Lou –
Can you believe we’re almost eighty. I keep thinking about Mama’s face when we turned forty. She said we were getting old and we laughed at her. We didn’t know a single thing.
I know you’ll say don’t make a fuss. I’m making one anyway. I’m going to call you on the morning of the tenth and we’re going to stay on the phone as long as we want and I don’t care who has to wait.
I love you. Happy birthday a few days early.
– Vera
Louise folded it back along its crease.
“She didn’t know,” Louise said. “She thought she’d be there to call.”
Helen looked at the cake. The gold numbers. The pansies on the frosting.
“I’ve had twelve people want to sing to me today,” Louise said, “and the one person I wanted to hear from couldn’t.”
Her voice didn’t crack. It was just a fact. The kind you’ve turned over enough times that it’s gone smooth.
Helen sat with it. She didn’t try to fix it or frame it. She just let it be what it was.
Twelve People Upstairs
Helen’s phone buzzed again.
Jean: Everything okay? Should we come down?
Helen set it back down without answering.
She thought about something her mother used to say. That you can be kind in the wrong direction. That kindness pointing toward what you need to give, instead of what someone needs to receive, is a way of not really listening at all.
Helen had organized close to forty birthdays in this building. She knew the difference between the residents who wanted a crowd and the ones who wanted two people and a piece of cake. She’d thought Louise was the second kind and had still managed to misread her completely.
“Can I ask you something?” Helen said.
Louise waited.
“Do you want everyone to go home? I’ll call up and tell them. They’ll understand.”
Louise looked down at the card in her lap. Then at the pansy cake again, longer this time.
“You ordered those on purpose,” she said. “The flowers.”
“I overheard you once. You mentioned your mother liked them.”
Louise was quiet.
“Vera would have done that,” she said finally. “She was the one who remembered things like that. I was always the one who forgot.”
Helen didn’t say anything.
“She would have wanted me to let people in,” Louise said. “That’s what I keep coming back to. She would have called me stubborn and told me to open the door.”
Helen waited.
“I’m not ready to be happy about it.”
“You don’t have to be.”
Louise looked at her. A long look, the kind that’s actually checking something.
“No singing,” she said.
“Done.”
“And don’t let Bill Kowalski make a speech. He made a speech at Marge’s birthday that went eleven minutes. I timed it.”
“I’ll cut him off at four.”
Louise put the card back in her cardigan pocket.
Before They Came Through the Door
Neither of them stood up right away.
Helen texted Jean: Give us five more minutes. No singing. Tell Bill: no speeches.
Jean’s reply came in about four seconds: Done. Tell Louise we love her.
Helen read it. She didn’t show it to Louise. She’d save that for later, or maybe not at all. Some things you pass along and some things you just hold for a person until they’re ready.
She poured herself a fresh cup from the carafe and sat back down.
Outside the dining room window, a cloud crossed the sun. The light in the room went grey for a second, flat and dull, and then came back. Down on the street a car alarm went off and stopped.
“Tell me one more thing about her,” Helen said. “Before they come down.”
Louise looked at the window.
“She was funnier than me. Everyone always assumed we’d be identical in every way. We weren’t. She was the funny one and I was the serious one and she never let me forget it. Not for sixty years.”
“What did she look like?”
“Like me.” A pause. “But she smiled more.”
Helen drank her coffee. It was too hot and she drank it anyway.
She thought about a phone that rang every morning before breakfast for fifty-eight years, and then one morning didn’t. She thought about a card written in purple ink, forwarded from the wrong address, arriving three days after the funeral. She thought about a woman who’d been carrying it in her cardigan pocket through six months of Tuesday Bible studies and early departures and twelve neighbors upstairs with a plastic tablecloth and a grocery-store cake, because there was nowhere else it belonged.
Louise picked up her fork and cut a corner piece of the cake. Not a full slice. Just the corner, the part with extra frosting. She ate it standing up, which seemed deliberate.
“Good?” Helen asked.
“Grocery store cake.”
“I know.”
“It’s fine.” Almost warm. “Vera would have eaten three pieces and asked what bakery it came from.”
Helen set her cup down.
The elevator hummed somewhere in the building above them. Jean and Bill and the others, starting to move.
Louise straightened up and touched her hair where the paper crown had been, checking a shape that wasn’t there anymore.
“You can let them in,” she said.
—
If someone came to mind while you read this, they probably need to hear from you today.
Stories of quiet compassion and the truths people carry include the money Margaret found in her freezer and the neighbor who watched the night Frank’s wife was taken. And for another tender reminder that no one should carry a burden alone, read Walter’s story about the new notebook.
