It’s read constantly.
The staff told me they find the case open every morning.
I still volunteer.
Thursdays.
I’ve done it for four years now, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve done eleven hundred rooms or that I ever will, and I do it differently than he did, because I’m not him.
I don’t take the tabs.
I take a photograph of the room’s window, whatever the view is, and I write the name and the date and the true thing on the back of the print, and I have ninety-one of them in a box.
Ninety-one.
He’d have found that funny — he was very direct about the fact that the tabs were free and my system is expensive.And I ask the question.
Every time, in some form, when the moment’s right, in the words he used with me on an afternoon in March when I had no idea I was being asked something he’d asked eleven hundred and thirty-nine people before:
“Tell me a true thing nobody knows.”
Most of them have one ready.
That’s the part nobody believes until they’ve done it.
They’ve had it ready for years.
I wear the tab.
Not on that finger — on a chain, because it’s aluminum and it was bent and I was going to lose it.
People ask.
And I’ve got a short answer and a long one, and the short one is the one I use, and it’s the only sentence in this entire story that I know for certain Alden Voss would have approved of, because he said a version of it to me nine days before he d*ed, when I asked him — casually, making conversation, with no idea what I was asking — whether he’d ever been married.
“Once,” he said. “Right now. For a week.”
“Alden. Was there anybody, ever? Before?”
And my husband of four days, who had sat with eleven hundred and thirty-nine dy*ng strangers and taken a pull tab from every single room, said:
“Willa, I’ve had eleven hundred people tell me the truest thing about themselves. That’s more marriage than most men get.”
