Porch Light

I died in aisle four of the Piggly Wiggly, between the canned peaches and the fruit cocktail. My husband would have laughed, because in forty-four years of marriage I never once bought fruit cocktail. But I was reaching for a can of it. I don't know why. Maybe dying makes you curious.

One second there was a pain like somebody had set a cast-iron skillet on my chest. The next, I was standing up while the rest of me stayed down there on the linoleum, and the boy from produce was hollering for somebody to call somebody.

"Mrs. Pruitt," said a voice behind me. "You got a minute?"

I turned around. A woman in a yellow rain slicker was leaning on the shopping carts, though it hadn't rained in Calloway County since Easter. She had a clipboard, and the look of somebody from the county who has come to tell you your septic tank is out of code.

"I expect I've got all the minutes now," I said.

"That's the spirit." She clicked her pen. "Ruth Ann Pruitt. Seventy-one. Widowed. One son, Gary, two grandkids, one sister. Heart." She glanced down at the body, then at me. "Clean, at least. Quick. People pay good money for quick."

"Are you the Lord?"

She laughed, and it sounded like a screen door slapping shut. "Lord, no. I'm more what you'd call administrative. Here's the thing, Ruth Ann. Every so often somebody comes through with a regret heavy enough that it bends the floorboards. Yours is a heavy one, and it's been bending things for forty-seven years. So I'm authorized to make you an offer."

"What kind of offer?"

"A second chance at life. Pulse, breath, the whole business. And one regret undone, if you can manage it." She tapped the clipboard. "There's a catch. There's always a catch. You get to interact with exactly one living person, and it has to be someone who doesn't know you've died. Everybody else, you're furniture. They'll walk past you and walk through you. You'll be a draft in the room, a cold spot on the stairs."

I looked down at myself on the floor. My pocketbook had spilled. There was a roll of Certs and a church bulletin and the reading glasses I'd been looking for since Sunday.

"Everybody's going to know," I said. "Gary will have the whole county called by suppertime. It'll be in the Ledger by Thursday."

"Will it?" said the woman in the slicker. "Everybody?"

That's when I thought of Dolly.

I'll tell you what I did. You might as well know, since it's what all this is about.

In April of 1979, my sister Dolores Jean was nineteen and I was twenty-four. Mama had been gone eight months. Daddy had mostly been gone longer than that, though his body still sat in the recliner every night with the TV on. I was running that house. I was working the Dairy Queen, paying the light bill, and making sure Dolly finished school. I didn't think of it as a sacrifice. That was just the shape of things.

Then Dolly met a boy named Roy Cobb who played bass guitar in a band called the Tennessee Walkers. He had a Pontiac with one blue door and a plan to go to Nashville, and Dolly decided his plan was hers too.

I came home early from work that night because I'd had a feeling. She was in our bedroom with Mama's old Samsonite open on the bed, folding her good blouses into it.

I wish I could tell you I was gentle. I wish I could tell you I said anything at all that was about her and not about me.

I said: If you walk out that door, don't you come back. Not when he leaves you, and he will. Not when you're broke, and you will be. Don't you call, and don't you come crying up this porch. This door is closed to you.

She looked at me like I'd slapped her. Then she snapped the suitcase shut, walked out to that two-tone Pontiac, and was gone.

She didn't come home for twenty-two years.

She didn't come home when Roy left her in Memphis in '81, which he did, or when she was broke, which she was. She didn't come for Daddy's funeral in '88. She sent flowers, a big spray of white lilies with a card that only said Dolly. Years later I learned she'd driven all the way to the county line that day and sat in a Shoney's parking lot for three hours. She couldn't make herself go any further. She believed me. That's the part that's been sitting on my chest longer than any heart attack. I said the door was closed, and my baby sister believed me for twenty-two years.

When she did come back, in 2001, it was for Gary's wedding. She was polite, and so was I. After that we sent Christmas cards and birthday calls. Twice we went to lunch at the Cracker Barrel off the interstate and talked about the weather and our knees. Neither of us ever said one word about April 1979. I kept meaning to, the way you keep meaning to clean out the gutters. There's always another season.

Then three years ago Dolly started forgetting things. First it was her keys, then her car, then the year. Now she lives at Sunrise Gardens Memory Care on Route 9, in a room with a window that looks out on a birdfeeder nobody fills.

Gary and I decided together that if I went first, nobody would tell her. The doctor said it was a kindness. She wouldn't hold onto it. She'd just have to hear it new every day and grieve it new every day.

So there was one living person in the whole world who didn't know Ruth Ann Pruitt was dead.

"I'll take it," I told the woman in the slicker.

"Thought you might." She tore a page off the clipboard and handed it to me. It was blank. "Clock starts now."

I'll skip over my funeral. It was a nice service. Gary did all right with the eulogy, though he told the story about the possum in the chimney wrong. I sat in the third pew. Mrs. Lattimore from the choir sat down directly on top of me and shivered, said the church needed new weatherstripping, and moved over.

It's a lonely thing, being furniture. I won't pretend it isn't.

On the fourth day I walked out Route 9 to Sunrise Gardens. That's eleven miles, and I'd have told you three weeks ago my knees couldn't do two. But dead knees, or second-chance knees, or whatever these were, they didn't complain.

I got there at a quarter to seven in the evening. The sun was going orange over the Walmart, and I could hear Dolly from the end of the hall.

"Where's my other shoe? Has anybody seen my other shoe? He's coming at seven!"

A young nurse with a name tag that said KEISHA was standing in the doorway of 114, speaking low and patient. "Miss Dolly, honey, nobody's coming. Why don't we sit down and watch Wheel?"

"Roy's coming at seven," Dolly said. "I have to be ready before Ruthie gets home."

I stood very still in that hallway.

Keisha came out and passed right through my left shoulder. She muttered something about the air conditioning and wrote on her chart, Sundowning again. Packing behavior. 1979?

I went in.

My sister was sixty-six years old, with white hair cut short the way the aides do it because it's easy. She had on a pink cardigan buttoned wrong. On the bed was a little rolling suitcase the facility must have given up trying to take from her. She was folding a hand towel into it with great care, like it was her good blouse.

She looked up and saw me, and her whole face crumpled with dread.

"Ruthie," she said. "You're not supposed to be home. You work till nine."

It hit me then, the way the pain hit me in aisle four. It wasn't 2026 in that room. It was a Tuesday night in April 1979, and Dolly had been living in it every evening for God knows how long. She packed the same bag and waited for the same Pontiac, and she braced every night for the same thing I'd said.

I'd been given a second chance. I hadn't understood that it was hers too.

"I came home early," I said. My voice came out strange, rusty. "I had a feeling."

Dolly lifted her chin. It was the same chin, nineteen or sixty-six. "Don't start. I mean it, Ruthie. I've made up my mind."

And here is the terrible thing, the thing I want you to understand. The old words came right up my throat. If you walk out that door. Forty-seven years and they were still there, worn smooth as creek rocks, waiting. That's how a regret works. It isn't one thing you did once. It's a groove you keep falling back into.

I swallowed them. It took everything I had, but I swallowed them.

"I'm not going to start," I said. "Can I help you pack?"

Dolly stared at me. Her hands stopped on the towel.

"You're not mad?"

"I'm a whole lot of things," I said. "Mad's not the main one."

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I picked up a washcloth from the stack she'd gathered and folded it into thirds the way Mama taught us, and laid it in the suitcase.

"You'll need more than that," I said. "Nashville gets cold at night. Take my blue sweater. The good one."

"Your church sweater?"

"It always looked better on you anyhow."

She let out a laugh that was half a sob. "Ruthie, what's wrong with you?"

"Nothing's wrong with me." I took her hand, and it was warm and papery and real. The woman in the slicker had told the truth about that much. "Dolly, listen to me. I need you to hear something, and I need you to keep it, all right? Put it somewhere safe."

She nodded slowly.

"You go on to Nashville. You go see what's out there. And if it's wonderful, I want to hear every bit of it. And if it's awful," I said, and squeezed her hand, "if Roy turns out to be exactly as sorry as I think he is, and you end up broke in some motel with the ice machine banging all night…"

"Ruthie."

"…then you come home. You don't call first. You don't need a reason. You don't need to be sorry, and you don't need to have done anything with yourself. You just come up that porch and walk in the door. It's your door, Dolly. It's always going to be your door."

My sister looked at me for a long time. Somewhere down the hall, Wheel of Fortune was spinning, and a woman was buying a vowel.

"Even if Roy…" she started.

"Especially if Roy."

Then she was crying, and so was I. Neither of us had cried in front of the other since Mama's funeral. Maybe not even then.

"Will you leave the porch light on?" she asked me. "So I can find it?"

"Every night," I said. "Every single night."

She leaned her head on my shoulder. We sat there while the sky went from orange to purple to dark, and seven o'clock came and went, and no Pontiac came. After a while she said, "I think I'm tired, Ruthie," and I helped her into her nightgown. I unbuttoned the cardigan she'd buttoned wrong and tucked her in like she was eight.

When I came out into the hallway, the woman in the slicker was leaning against the hand-sanitizer dispenser.

"Well," she said. "Look at you."

"Is that it?" I asked. "Is it undone?"

"For tonight." She flipped a page on her clipboard. "You know she won't remember it in the morning."

"I know."

"She'll pack that bag again tomorrow at six forty-five. Same as always. It'll be April 1979 all over again, and she'll be waiting for you to say the thing you said."

"I know," I said. "I'll be here."

The woman in the slicker looked at me over her clipboard for a long moment. I don't know what she was, but I think she might have been pleased.

"Second chance at life," she said. "Didn't say it'd be a big one."

"It's big enough," I said.

So that's what I did with it.

Every evening at a quarter to seven I walked into room 114. Every evening Dolly was packing that little rolling suitcase, braced for me. And every evening I sat down on the bed, helped her fold the towels, and told her the door was open.

Some nights she argued with me. Some nights she was suspicious, sure I was setting some kind of trap, and I had to say it three different ways before she'd let herself believe it. Some nights she cried, and some nights she laughed, and once she asked me if I'd ever been in love. I told her about Harold, though in 1979 I hadn't met him yet. She didn't mind the inconsistency. Neither did I.

Keisha started writing different things on the chart. Calm at sundown. Talks to someone she calls Ruthie. Sleeping through. At the shift change I heard her tell the night nurse, "I don't know what it is, but Miss Dolly's evenings got better."

Gary came on Sundays. One Sunday Dolly patted his hand and said, "Ruthie was here last night. She helped me pack. She's not mad at me anymore."

Gary went out to the parking lot and sat in his truck with his forehead against the steering wheel for twenty minutes. I sat in the passenger seat beside him, and I couldn't put my hand on his back, and that was its own small death. But I'd raised him to be the kind of man who could cry in a parking lot, and I was proud of that, even if all I could be was a cold spot on the vinyl.

In November something changed.

I came in at a quarter to seven like always, and the suitcase was there on the bed, but it was empty. Dolly was sitting in the chair by the window looking out at the birdfeeder. Somebody had finally filled it. A cardinal was going at the sunflower seeds like he had someplace to be.

"Roy's coming at seven," I said carefully, because I'd learned to let her lead.

"Let him come," Dolly said. "I don't think I'll go tonight."

I sat down on the bed.

"I keep thinking," she said, "I can always go. You said I can always come back, so I guess I can always go, too. It's not now or never." She looked over at me, and for just a moment her eyes were sixty-six years old and clear as well water. "It never was now or never, was it, Ruthie?"

"No, honey," I said. "I don't believe it ever was."

She nodded like that settled it. We watched the cardinal until it got dark.

She didn't pack the suitcase after that. Some evenings she thought it was 1979 and some evenings she thought it was 1964 and we were girls. Some evenings she didn't seem to think it was any year at all, and we just sat there. But she never packed again. The groove had worn smooth and closed over, like a scar does.

Dolly died in her sleep the second week of February. Keisha found her in the morning with her hands folded and the window cracked, though it was thirty-one degrees out.

I knew before anybody told me. Everything went quiet, the way it does after a refrigerator you'd stopped hearing cuts off. The one living person who didn't know I was gone was gone herself, and I understood my terms had run out.

The woman in the slicker was waiting at the end of the hallway, by the double doors that open onto the parking lot.

"Time," she said, not unkindly.

"I know."

"For what it's worth," she said, tucking her clipboard under one arm, "I've been doing this a long while, and most people use it to fix the thing they did. You used it to fix what the thing did to her. That's rarer than you'd think."

"I just told her the truth," I said. "I just told it about forty-seven years too late."

"Hm," she said. "Was it, though?"

Then she pushed open the double doors. On the other side there was no parking lot. There was a porch, a sagging wooden porch with a swing on chains and a screen door that slapped. I would have known it anywhere, though the house had been sold in '93 and torn down in 2008.

The porch light was on.

And sitting on the top step in my good blue church sweater, nineteen years old with her chin up, was my sister.

"There you are," Dolly said. "I was starting to think you weren't coming."

"I was right behind you," I said.

She held out her hand, and I took it, and we went on in.