Donna Gentile

I liked her room more than mine. It was dark and cool in the day and warm and covered in light at night. Maria had two windows and they were covered with thin lace cloth. On her dresser stood a good number of picture frames. I’d find her in the same place each evening, after Erla had gone to sleep and Seymor was still out on the back porch whittling. She’d sit on her bed, legs crossed, with her wall of pillows, knitting in her lap and a show on her computer.

The first time I’d gone to her room, I sat on the floor with my back against the wall. The second time, she invited me to sit opposite of her on the bed. There was a photo of a boy holding her in one of the frames. Around the rim it said some words of love and there were hearts drawn.

“I made that for him and planned on giving it to him until he didn’t show up on our anniversary.”

The next time I went to her room it wasn’t on the dresser anymore.

“You took your boyfriend down?”

“He hasn’t been my boyfriend for a long time, and even longer than that honestly.”

“Just time for him to go then?”

“Yeah.”

We sat silently. She knit, I thought of Estelle.

“How’d you know it was time?” I said.

“I stopped caring to remember knowing him,” she said, “I think he was just passing through.”

“That’s a sad thing to say.”

“Not really.”

I told her I hoped I would always care to remember knowing Estelle.

She didn’t respond.

She came closer to show me how some pattern in her knitting changed and made a distinct weave across where she said the sweater would wrap around her waist. She was warm and her shoulder leaned against mine. The next morning, I asked Seymor what he was whittling for, he ignored my question as he often did, and told me, instead, that love never dies. He said even kissing someone besides the one you love will create an internal state of such upheaval and chaos that it will leave your heart better off dead. He could’ve said that for a million reasons, or purely out of his own insanity. I wondered if he knew about last night. He said it’d been eight months since Maria’s mother had died.

“What’re you gonna do with all those sticks?” I asked.

“Pile them up over there,” he pointed at what looked like eight months of naked whittled sticks.

It snowed that night in sheets with a terrible wind and I asked myself, over and over until we fell asleep, if my heart was better off dead. Either way it was warm there with Maria. In the morning I sat with Erla and drank my coffee. I asked her how to know if your heart is dead. She told me I was talking nonsense because when your heart dies it stops pumping blood and you die and there’s no point in trying to know anything then.