She looked at the brick wall outside the window.
“Two days, Daniel. Staring at those blank white walls. There was nothing to look at. No sky. No trees. No light except that buzzing bulb. Frank was there as much as they’d let him be, but he had to sleep sometime, and he had to work. And I just lay there in that bed and looked at the wall and thought, this is what the end of the world looks like. Just a white wall that never changes.”
I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.
“We named her Grace,” she said. “We buried her at St. Joseph’s, next to my mother. You’ve been to her grave, Daniel. You just didn’t know it.”
I had. The little white stone at the end of the row in Grandma’s family plot. Every Memorial Day, Grandma would bring flowers there first, before she went to anybody else’s grave. A tiny stone with just one word on it. GRACE. I always thought it was a great-aunt or somebody from a long time ago.
