Chapter 7: Gran's Sunday

I sat down on the floor by the door with his sketchbook open in my lap.

There was a date in the corner of every page, in his small square handwriting.

The first one was from two years ago, a week after we met.

Me at the coffee shop on Central, drawing a moose on a napkin with my tongue between my teeth.

Me on the Stone Arch Bridge in the wind, my hair everywhere, yelling at a goose.

Me asleep on his chest on the couch with my mouth open. He'd even drawn the drool. He'd drawn it lovingly.

Me in the clawfoot tub with bubbles to my chin, reading one of his lighthouse books.

Two years.

Hundreds of me.

The last pages were from this week.

The back of my head at the drafting table.

The back of my head on the pillow, with a long empty strip of mattress before it.

My back. My back. My back.

The very last page was from Friday.

It wasn't me at all.

It was just the edge of our bed, with my blanket pulled up over a shape.

A big hand rested on the mattress beside it, palm up, not touching anything.

I closed the sketchbook.

I put it back in his bag exactly the way I'd found it, under the gum.

I didn't take the eraser.

I sat on the floor for a long time.

On Sunday we drove to Saint Paul for dinner at Gran's, like every Sunday.

Gran is eighty-one and about five feet tall and has lived in the same little yellow house on the East Side since 1968.

She raised Knox in it from the age of six.

She met us at the door in her church cardigan.

"There's my boy," she said, and Knox bent down nearly in half so she could kiss his cheek.

Then she grabbed my face in both her hands and kissed my forehead hard.

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