PART 5 — FINAL
Corinne Ashby d*ed in February.
Ninety-two.
My mother sat with her the last two weeks, every day, which is four months of a friendship stretched over thirty-one years of silence, and I have decided not to call that fair.
It isn’t.
Some things did not come back.
Twenty-seven years of a signature that nobody had needed since 1998.
Four of the nineteen surviving women had d*ed in the two years before we found out the agreement was void.
Mom keeps their names on an index card in the folder, and she reads them, and I have stopped telling her not to.
And my father.
Sam Delaine drove Thursdays for nine years and never told me, and d*ed when I was twenty-six, and I cannot ask him a single question about it.
That’s the one that gets me at odd hours.
Mom says: “Honey, he’d have told you the same thing he told me when I asked why he never talked about it.
‘It wasn’t mine to tell.
It was hers.'”
The county did something in the spring.
They renamed the shelter.
It had been called Haven House since 1996, which is a fine name that means nothing, and in April it became the Ashby Center, and there is a forget-me-not on the sign.
Mom cut the ribbon.
She wore a short-sleeved blouse, which she has not done in public since 1994.
And she has started talking.
That’s the part I did not expect.
Ruthann Delaine, who answered a question the same seven words for thirty-one years, now speaks — to nursing classes, to a county board, twice to a room full of police cadets who were nineteen years old and had never heard of a decade when an officer would not remove a man from his own home.
She is not good at it.
