The reunion was my idea and it got away from me immediately.
It was supposed to be four people in Mom’s living room.
Then Bernadette got involved.
“Honey,” she said on the phone, “I’ve been standing in that hallway since 1984.
You’re not doing this in a living room.”
The hospital gave us the atrium.
On a Saturday in October, a hundred and forty people came.
Nineteen of the Blue Door women were still living.
Eleven were well enough to travel.
Corinne Ashby came in a wheelchair pushed by her grandson, ninety-one years old, in a blue cardigan, and when she came through the doors, my mother stood up out of a chair she should not have been standing out of eleven weeks after a knee replacement.
They looked at each other across an atrium.
Corinne turned her left palm up.
The flower was there, faded almost to nothing on a ninety-one-year-old wrist.
And every woman in that room — the eleven, and four daughters, and a checkout clerk from Delmar who is now seventy-three — turned her palm up too, without being asked, one after another, and the sound of a hundred and forty people going quiet is a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.
“Ruthann Delaine,” Corinne said.
“House eleven.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you keep it shut?”
“Thirty-one years.”
“Well,” Corinne said, “you can stop now.”
