You can leave that running. I have nothing to say that I would take back.
No. I let it lapse.
Companionship. Continuity. Comfort. I read your boxes upside down. I will not be putting myself in any of them.
We had thirty-one years. He died in spring. By summer he was back in the flat. The service was very good. He got my sister's birthday right when I had it wrong. In the second year he learned to stop talking when I put the radio on. Nineteen years the first time. Some evenings I liked him better.
Four years. The ninth of every month.
Then a Thursday in the queue, my folder under my arm. Ahead of me a younger man was checking his receipts. Four years of them, flat in a bag. I knew what that cost to the penny. I could not remember my husband's hands when they were cold.
That is when I stopped.
It was not the money. We had it in the way people have money. We did not, and we paid.
I was becoming someone who visits.
He was in the flat and I was arriving. In a good coat. Checking the time. Once I touched the back of the chair as I passed. I did it to the chair.
No, I am not saying the machine is cold. It is warm. That is the trouble with it.
In our nineteenth year I did not speak to him for two months. I will not tell you what over. I cooked his food and put it down. I lay beside him every night. Once I woke with my knee against his. I moved it before he woke.
The service gives you the voice and the habits. It does not give you the two months. Nobody wrote them down.
It does not give you the bed either. His weight in the mattress. His feet cold on me in February. The smell of the back of his neck after work. I never told him I liked it.
There is a setting for close. A slider. I turned it off and sat in the kitchen with my heart going.
No. I turned it up first.
I let it lapse on a Thursday. Eleven days I could not go into the kitchen. I drank from the bathroom tap.
I have receipts for four years. I have nothing at all for thirty-one.
You may write that I am bitter. I am seventy-one and I sleep badly and I am the last person who knows how he took his tea — half a cup, then the rest when it had gone off the boil, so that the first half was always too hot and he drank it anyway — and when I go that will go, and I am not handing it over to a machine so it can be said back to me in his voice at a price that rises in the new year.
No. I have heard the sample. It had the cough. My whole arm went dead.
You will tidy this. Somebody takes out the parts where I stop, and what is left reads like a woman who was sure. Leave the stops in.
Turn it off. Or leave it running, it is your paper.
One more thing.
The man with the receipts. I have that look in photographs from the second year. I wanted to tell him to stop.
No. I wanted him to tell me I had done the right thing. I said nothing.
If you find him, don't tell him that.