But she looked at me when I sat down and she said: what is it?
Just that.
The specific question of a woman who has been reading people for eighty-six years and who knows a significant thing is coming.
I said: I saved up. I want to take you somewhere.
She said: where?
I said: Florida. The coast. I want to take you to see the ocean.
She was very still for a moment.
She said: the ocean.
She said it like a word she had not said in a long time.
Like something she had kept in the back of her mind for years and that was now being brought to the front.
Then she cried.
Rose does not cry easily.
She cried at Edwin’s funeral.
She cried when I graduated.
She cries at certain hymns, the ones that Edwin loved.
She was crying now.
She said, in the way that she says things when she is feeling too much for her voice: you mean I’m actually going to see the ocean?
