“Write in the margins,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are we going to?”
I thought about Estelle’s handwriting packed into the margins of a lifetime’s worth of knowing. I thought about what I’d add if I wrote in those margins — what I’d learned over the past two years worth adding to a book about building something from almost nothing.
“Yes,” I said. “But not yet. Let’s read it first.”
She nodded. Then she asked, “Do you think he’s okay? Albert?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“He kept paying for the storage unit,” she said. “Even when he didn’t have anywhere to live.”
“Yes.”
“Because he wasn’t ready to let it go.”
“That’s what he said.”
She sat quiet for a moment.
“But then he was ready,” she said.
“Then he was ready,” I agreed.
She looked back at the notebook.
“She must have been really good,” Lily said.
“She wrote it down so that someone else could use it,” I said. “That’s a good kind of person.”
Lily thought this over.
“We should do something good,” she said. “Because of the thing Albert did. Like a chain.”
I looked at my daughter.
“What would you want to do?”
She considered it. “The shelter. The one in town. You said there are people who don’t have somewhere to sleep.”
“Yes.”
“We could make soup,” she said. “We’re good at soup.”
We called the shelter Monday morning. They said yes, they took food donations, and that soups and stews were especially useful. They gave us the number of a woman named Ruth who managed the kitchen donations.
We called Ruth.
Ruth was practical and precise, in the way people running shelter kitchens tend to be after enough years at it, and told us what they needed, in what amounts, and how to deliver it. She said individual donations were often more reliable than organized drives, since individual donors tended to keep showing up, and consistency mattered to the shelter more than anything else.
We made soup that Thursday, Lily and I, in the biggest pot I owned — technically too large for just the two of us, but I’d kept it because you never know. We made the chicken soup straight from Estelle’s notebook, following her handwritten instructions for a handful of this and until it smells right, and Lily was the one who decided when it smelled right, since her nose was sharper than mine and she’d read the recipe herself and decided she knew exactly what Estelle meant.
