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“What do you two do in there?” I asked him once, buckling his seatbelt.
“Housekeeping,” he said, and patted my knee.
What I did was my own quiet work. I kept a shoebox in the trunk, under the jack. And what went into that shoebox, month after month, Roy and Sandra would learn about on Friday.
Friday came. Mr. Katz’s little office smelled like coffee and paper. Roy arrived checking his watch — he had a realtor meeting about my house at noon. Sandra brought her daughter to watch the show. They took the two front chairs and left me the stool by the copier. That was fine. I knew those chairs well.
Mr. Katz set out one folder and one small black machine.
“Before any reading,” he said, “Arthur left instructions. We begin with his voice.”
He pressed the button, and my husband’s voice filled that little room — steady and clear, the way it sounded before the sickness. Both of his children went still as photographs.
“Hello, Roy. Hello, Sandra. If you are hearing this, you are sitting in the chairs I sat in every month while you believed a dying man couldn’t see what his own children were doing. The 1998 will was revoked on our very first Tuesday. Every month after that, I signed a new statement and recorded my voice, so no one could ever stand up later and claim I didn’t know my own mind. Twenty-two months of proof. Mr. Katz has all of it.”
Sandra’s head turned toward me slowly.
“Now the pills,” Arthur’s voice went on. “Sandra, on the night you brought papers to my hospice bed, you crushed one of my sleeping pills into my tea so I would sign without reading. The night nurse counted the pills, wrote it down, and signed her name. Helen, my love — open the shoebox.”
