You were gone by the time we dropped your grandson off at college, but I remember how you made the bed in my dorm room when you dropped me off forty years earlier. You probably hadn’t made a bed since you were single—and definitely not one with patterned sheets. You put on the top sheet facing up, so the pattern of poppies was hidden by the blanket, and I couldn’t see them when I folded back the covers to get into bed, but I kept doing it that way because it was like having you close by.
            Once, when I was in first grade, you gave me a little extra lunch money so I could buy ice cream for dessert. I used it to buy ice cream for some girl who was mean to me, to bribe her into being my friend, and lied when you asked me about it later.
            “I’d rather know the truth, no matter what you did,” you said, and you meant it.
            But when you felt your mind slipping and you couldn’t trust your body, you started lying to me about when you’d last eaten, or how long it had been since you’d been to the doctor. I’d visit you in Florida and there would be rotten stuff in the refrigerator, leftovers from the last meal I’d cooked for you weeks earlier. Grapes you’d asked me to buy at Publix, brown and shriveled in their Styrofoam tray, the plastic wrap intact.
            You had a car accident, and you didn’t tell me about it. I learned about it from one of your friends. He was afraid you’d hurt yourself the next time.
            “Your father’s gotten careless behind the wheel,” Alan said. Had you? Or did you want to die?
            You had a fall and broke your shoulder—a blessing, really, because it meant you couldn’t drive. I remember driving you somewhere in your car, listening to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, “A Taste of Honey.” You loved horns, from New Orleans jazz to Cuban Rumba. Anything with a syncopated beat.
            You resented me for loving you too much and trying to hold you to the earth when you wanted to leave. At the end, all we did was argue.

I’m sitting on the esplanade in the Chicago Botanical Gardens, listening to Spanish guitar as the sun goes down. Streaky clouds, their grays deepening to purple where the sky meets the treetops. The guitarist plucks a series of chords in a minor key, notes ascending, descending, against the steady cha cha of the percussion. There’s a couple dancing all by themselves on the stone patio behind the band, legs and hips moving in synchrony. Wordless communication.
            You were as afraid of losing yourself as I was of losing you. Of course you were.

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