Chapter 20 — TWO BEDROOMS

The guardianship was granted on the eleventh of June in Columbia County Surrogate's Court.

It took eighty-two days from her death, which Paula says is fast, and which is fast entirely because of two documents: a nomination from a fit parent, and a completed, approved kinship home study that had been sitting on file since the twenty-eighth of February.

Tom Ferraro testified. He was asked whether the placement was suitable and he said it was, and then he was asked whether he had any concerns, and he said one.

He said: "The petitioner is seventy-one."

That is a legitimate concern and he was right to say it and I would have thought less of him if he had not.

The judge asked me about it directly.

I said I had thought about very little else since November. I said that I had liquidated my largest asset and set up a trust with Paula naming a successor guardian — Renee Aldarisio, who could not take two children into a three-bedroom house in Poughkeepsie but who could and did agree to be named on a document — and that I had funded it, and that the children's education was paid for whether I am here or not.

The judge said, "Mr. Harrison, are you in good health?"

I said, "I'm seventy-one, Your Honour. I'm in the health you'd expect."

And she said, "That's a more honest answer than I usually get," and she granted it.

Eli is eleven now.

Mabel is seven.

She talks in class. She talks so much in class that Cassie Pruitt sent home a note in October that was, technically, a complaint, and which I have in the fire box in the basement next to her grandmother's directive, because it is the best piece of paper I own.

The plastic bag is still under her bed. The rabbit is on the bed now. The library book went back in April and I paid a fine of eleven dollars and forty cents and the librarian tried to waive it and I made her take it.

Eli still checks the bathroom first when we come into a room.

Dr. Barrow — no, I will get her name right, she deserves it — Dr. Adaeze Barrow, who sees them both on Thursdays, says that one will take years and that we should not make a project out of it.

He also still calls the hospital sometimes.

Not the fourth floor. The main line. He calls and hangs up. He does not know I know, and I am not going to tell him, and Dr. Barrow says to leave it alone and that he will stop when he stops.

Dwight Poole still runs the evening shift. He taught Eli to break down the grill in the summer and paid him twenty dollars a week out of his own pocket for four weeks before I found out and made Costa put him on the books properly for eight hours a week, which is legal at eleven with a permit in this state for a family business, and which I made sure was legal because I am not going to have one thing in this story that is not on paper.

Renata Cruz is at Columbia-Greene doing nursing. She is on the schedule Fridays and Saturdays only. I pay the tuition. There is no arrangement about it and no repayment and I have told her that if she brings it up again I will stop coming in on Thursdays.

The sign is still by the register. *If you're short, ask. It's already paid for.*

The diner closes at nine.

I have never asked Costa to change it and he has never offered, and it is right that it closes at nine, because a business is a business.

But the light over the counter stays on until half past.

That was Dwight's idea, and he did not tell me he was doing it, and I found out in August when I drove past at nine twenty and saw it burning.

I asked him about it.

He said, "In case somebody's walking."

Last Tuesday I was in booth three with the paper and Mabel was doing homework across from me and Eli was behind the counter with a cloth, and Mabel looked up and asked me why the room on the back of the house is newer than the rest of it.

I said I built it.

She said why.

And I said, because item nineteen says that a boy and a girl over the age of five cannot share a bedroom, and I had one bedroom, and I needed two.

She thought about that for a while, the way she thinks about things, which is exactly the way her mother did — head tipped, no expression at all until the very end.

Then she said, "So you built the room before you knew you'd get us?"

I said yes.

And my granddaughter said, "That was pretty risky," and went back to her homework.

I have three regrets and I am going to put them down and then I am finished.

The first is that I did not go into that hospital on the twelfth of November. I sat in a parking lot for fifty minutes and then I cleaned my gutters. That is a day I do not get.

The second is that I never said to my daughter, in any of the eleven weeks I had with her, the sentence *I should have found a way in too*. I let her carry the whole of the twenty years. She apologised, in her way, in a legal document. I never did.

The third is not mine, exactly, but I hold it: that a woman who was dying sat at a counter twenty feet from her father and drank a cup of coffee and got up and left, three separate times, because she could not think of the first sentence.

If there is anything in this worth taking away, it is that.

There was never a locked door.

There were two people who both believed the other one had locked it, and twenty years went by, and then a ten-year-old with sixty-one dollars and a map drawn on the back of a pharmacy printout walked through it at four minutes past nine and asked for one meal for him and his sister.