Chapter 17 — THE YELLOW PAPER

I found Mabel's plastic bag under the bed in the second bedroom, which is where she had been keeping it since January, and where she moved it to under the new bed in March, and where she kept it, I found out much later, until she was nine.

The hairbrush. The rabbit with one ear. The toothbrush. The overdue library reader.

And, flat against the bottom, folded into quarters, a piece of yellow paper.

It is a New York State advance health care directive.

It is dated the sixth of October — five weeks before Eli walked into my diner.

It is in my daughter's handwriting, which had already gone shaky at the ends of the letters, and it is signed, and it is notarised, and the notary's stamp is from a UPS Store on Route 9 that charges six dollars.

She had done it alone. She had walked to a UPS Store with cancer and paid six dollars and had a stranger stamp it.

She had appointed a health care agent.

The name on that line is *Renee Aldarisio*, and beside it, in the alternate agent line, my daughter had written:

*Walter J. Harrison (father) — if Renee cannot.*

I sat down on the floor of that bedroom.

In October — before she sent her son to me, before she knew whether I would even open the door, when I was still nothing but a man who owned a building — my daughter had written my name on the line that says *the person who decides when I cannot*.

The exact line.

The exact one.

And on the last page, in the section for anything else, she had written four lines and I am going to put all four of them here because they are the centre of this entire account.

*I do not want to be kept going. I have read what my mother wrote — Dad kept a copy in the fire box and I read it when I was 19, in the summer, when he was at work, and I put it back and I never told him.*

*I have been angry for twenty years about a thing I already knew the answer to.*

*If it comes to it, don't ask me. I've written it down. Don't make anybody stand in a corridor and decide.*

*Dad — I know. I've known since I was nineteen. I couldn't work out how to start.*

She had read it.

At nineteen.

She had come into my house while I was at work and opened the fire box and read her mother's handwriting and put it back and closed the lid, and then she had stayed away for another nineteen years, because by then the being-away had become its own thing with its own weight and there was no door left in it.

She was not angry with me about the paper.

She had been angry with me about the paper for two years, and then for nineteen more years she had been a person who could not think of a way to come back.

Three coffees at a counter twenty feet from my booth.

*Because I had a whole speech.*