I put my arm around her, and we stood there for a long time.
Dr. Hale retired two months later. At seventy-six. After fifty-one years at St. Andrew’s.
“I don’t need to stay in the building anymore,” he told me. “Everybody I was waiting for has come home.”
He comes to Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house now. Every week. He brings wine that Grandma says is too expensive and then drinks two glasses of. He and Grandma argue about everything. Politics. Baseball. The right way to make gravy. It’s the most fun I’ve seen her have since Grandpa died.
He gave me the shoebox. All fifty-one Christmas cards. Every picture of my father, from three months old to thirty-eight. On the back of each one, in his small, careful doctor’s handwriting, he’d written the date and one sentence.
“First Christmas. He has Ruth’s chin.”
