Her niece, Priscilla, visited maybe four times a year, always around a holiday, always leaving within the hour with some new complaint about how the old house needed updating, how the property taxes on Cornelius’s old rental buildings were getting out of hand, how Aunt Odetta really ought to think about selling and moving somewhere “more manageable” before something happened and nobody was around to help her.
I was around. I was there nearly every single week. Priscilla never once seemed to notice, or care, that the help her aunt supposedly needed was already sitting at that kitchen table, drinking out of a chipped mug that had somehow, quietly, become mine.
One Tuesday, about three years into all of it, Mrs. Vance asked me to drive her downtown instead of to her usual doctor’s appointment.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Title company,” she said. “Won’t take but twenty minutes.”
I waited in the small lobby while she disappeared into a back office with a man in a gray suit I didn’t recognize. When she came back out, she handed me a clipboard.
“Sign here,” she said, tapping a line near the bottom of a document I didn’t read closely. “Just a witness signature. Formality, settling some of Cornelius’s old paperwork.”
“Just a witness signature.”
I signed without asking many questions. That was how it always went with Mrs. Vance’s errands — she gave me just enough information to complete the task, and I’d learned a long time ago not to push past what she was willing to offer.
We stopped for two more of those “quick formalities” over the following year. A different office each time. A different clipboard, a different line marked with a small red arrow sticker, always the same instruction.
“Just a witness signature, Elijah. Won’t take but a minute.”
I never asked what the documents actually said. I understand now that not asking was probably the single most important thing I ever did for her, though I had no idea at the time I was doing anything at all.
Mrs. Vance passed away on a Thursday morning in early spring, in her sleep, in the same bed she’d shared with Cornelius for forty-one years before he’d gone eight years earlier.
I found out from Otis, who’d heard it from a customer, who’d heard it from a neighbor on Featherstone Lane. I sat down hard in the diner’s back booth and didn’t move for the better part of an hour.
The funeral was small, quiet, mostly church folks and a handful of neighbors. Priscilla wore black that looked freshly purchased and cried in a way that struck me, uncharitably, as more performance than grief. I didn’t say that out loud to anybody. Some things you just carry.
