NOW JOANNA IS HOLDING the hand of someone waiting for her daughter to arrive. Only months ago, this woman—Lois Flowers—was one of the regulars in Pine Haven’s dining room where the residents often linger long after the meal for some form of entertainment or another. She was a woman who kept her hair dyed black and never left her room without her hair and makeup and outfit just right. She had her color chart done in 1981 and kept the little swatches like paint chips in the zippered section of her purse. She told Joanna that having your colors done was one of the best investments a woman could ever make. “I’m a winter,” she said. “It’s why turquoise looks so good on me.” She loved to sing and some nights she could convince several people to join in; other nights she simply stood in one corner and swayed back and forth like she might have been in Las Vegas singing everything she knew of Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney and Judy Garland. She loved anything Irving Berlin had ever written. Now she has forgotten everything except the face of her daughter, random lyrics, and that your shoes and purse should always match. Joanna has watched the daughter night after night leaning into her mother’s ear to sing—first upbeat (clang, clang, clang went the trolley). She always ends with one of her very favorites like “It Could Happen to You” or “Over the Rainbow” or “What’ll I Do?” Joanna—as ordered by Luke’s many rules—keeps a notebook with an entry on each of the people she sits with. She has to do an official one to turn over to the nurse who oversees her work, but this is a different, personal notebook she writes just after someone has died. It’s a notebook she bought and showed Luke to prove to him that she was taking his assignments seriously—a bright yellow college-ruled spiral-bound notebook, which was all she could find at the Thrifty Market there close to Luke’s house. It was near the end for him so she didn’t venture far. “This is my page,” he told her. “Everybody should get at least a page.” She writes what she knows: their names and birthplaces and favorite things. Sometimes she asks questions: What is your first memory? Your favorite time of day or holiday or teacher or article of clothing? How would you describe your marriage? Was there something you learned in your life that surprised you? She records the weather and season and last words if there are any. Luke said that this would be her religion, the last words and memories of the dying her litany. She should read and reread the entries regularly like devotionals. Keep us close, he said. Keep us alive. Don’t ever let us disappear.
THE LONGEST AND most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself. Joanna’s life is blip blip blip like images on an old film projector that keeps sticking and burning. She’s been spliced a lot of times over the years, but finally she feels free—not perfect, not problem free, just free. No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.
She has spent long hours discussing this with C.J., a girl most likely not to be Joanna’s best friend, and yet she is. C.J. is half her age, punk and pierced and tattooed with a baby boy whose father she won’t discuss—not yet at least. C.J. is beautiful and so unaware of it, long legs and hazel eyes and a beautiful dark complexion that leaves people perplexed and wondering about her ethnicity. It seems she might even be perplexed herself and camouflages herself with tattoos and loose clothing and colors of hair dyes that are not natural to any race.
C.J. claims to have lots of secrets, lots of ghosts, and she says she writes down all the bad stuff in her journal, which she calls Pandora’s Box, and hides it there in the best security safe of all. She said she made a special trip to Costco to buy her “safe deposit box”—a mega-sized box of Kotex, which she then positioned at the back of her linen closet with “the sentry” placed in front: Monistat and Vagisil and all kinds of douches. She said it was a security system easily tested in