Chapter 23: The Blue Cloth

Odessa lived nineteen more days, and she spent every one of them giving orders from the chair by the window.

She told the crew how to splice a line.

She told Ben his coffee was weak, and me that mine was a crime.

The thin woman from the barge came on Sundays with a pie.

Odessa told her the debt was paid, and the woman cried into the dish towel.

On the twentieth night she asked for the window open.

The tide was high, and the pilings creaked, and the house moved the way it always did.

Ben sat on her left, and I sat on her right, and she held a hand of each.

"Benny," she said.

"I'm here, Ma."

"You've got a good one. Don't make her ask twice."

"I won't."

"Girl."

"I'm here."

Her fingers were light as paper in mine.

"You said her name for me every night for three years," she said. "I never thanked you for it."

I could not answer.

"Tell her I'm coming," Odessa whispered. "Tell Annie I took the long way."

She closed her eyes, and she did not open them again.

Ben held her hand until the tide turned.

We buried her on a Thursday in the cemetery above the harbor, beside her second husband.

Fifty women stood in the rows behind us, and not one face was dry.

The thin woman read a line from a letter Odessa had written years ago in Cell 8.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Took His Prison Sentence. Now He Begs. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.