As of October, the job seems secure. The budget discussions wrapped up, and my position wasn’t among those cut, which I learned the way you learn these things in administrative offices — not through any formal notice, but through the slow return of normal conversation around me, the fading of the particular collective anxiety that had hung there for weeks. I haven’t stopped watching for signals, because I’ve learned not to stop watching, but the signals are quiet for now.
The rent is due in three days.
I have it.
I have it with enough left over that I opened a savings account in September, under my own name — something I hadn’t had in twenty-one years. It isn’t much. But it’s an account, my name is the only one on it, and the number in it comes from my own work and no one else’s decisions.
I found this unexpectedly moving when the bank representative handed me the paperwork, and I signed it, and she asked if I had questions, and I said no, and she told me to have a great day, and I went out to my car and sat there for a few minutes thinking about what it meant to own something that unambiguously.
I thought of Estelle: the things that are yours are yours because of the work.
Yes, I thought.
Yes.
Lily wants to go to the shelter on Fridays now — not every Friday, but most — to help Ruth in the kitchen. Ruth said yes. I said yes. Lily said she wanted to learn to make stock the way Albert made it, which Ruth described to us as unhurried and very particular about the temperature — a description I felt I could have guessed just from the letter.
He’s still there, as far as I know. Still in the kitchen. Ruth mentions him now and then, without much detail, with the same respect for privacy she shows everyone in her care. She says he’s doing well. She says he’s taught two other residents to make a proper stock, which she counts as an accomplishment.
She says he seems less worn out than when he arrived.
I think about the porch, the storm, the folded quilt, the envelope under the doormat, and about what Albert wrote at the end of his letter: I hope your worries get smaller.
