Chapter 7: August Ninth

I had never signed Ryan's lease.

I knew that the way you know your own birthday.

But I'd believed a lot of wrong things that month.

So on Monday I went to the leasing office on Wayne Avenue and asked to see it.

The property manager was a heavy woman in a purple fleece with a coffee mug that said "World's Okayest Boss."

She pulled up the file and turned her screen toward me.

There it was, on the renewal from last summer.

"Co-signer: Lindsay M. Lowry."

A signature that looked sort of like mine. Rounder. The J too big.

Dated August 9.

I stared at the date.

"Is something wrong, hon?"

"That's the day my grandmother died."

The manager's face softened.

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"I was at the hospice from six in the morning until almost midnight. I didn't leave. I couldn't have signed this."

She looked at the screen again.

"It says it was signed here in the office. Two fifteen in the afternoon."

"Then someone else was sitting in that chair."

She didn't say anything for a while.

"He's moving out Friday," she said at last. "Come back Friday. Bring whatever you've got."

What I had was a phone call.

I called the hospice from my car.

The woman at the front desk remembered me.

"You're the granddaughter from room nine," she said. "You held her hand all day. The nurses brought you soup."

I didn't cry until after she said she'd email me the visitor log.

It came an hour later, a photo of a clipboard page.

"J. Lowry. In: 6:10 AM. Out: 11:42 PM."

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