Goodbye for Now Read Online Free PDF Page A

times, that was the approach Sam tried anyway.
    Meredith answered the door in sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a scarf, a hat, mittens, and what looked like several layers of socks. So the opposite of naked. She hugged him, and he felt the return of his lungs, and he held her for a little bit, just savoring, before he whispered into her hair, “It’s August. It’s seventy-five degrees out. Why are you dressed for January?”
    “I can’t get warm,” she said. “I can’t stop shivering.”
    “Are you sick?”
    She shook her head but wouldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry I forgot to come get you.”
    “It’s okay.” He was puzzled, waiting.
    “Absence really does make you insane, I guess.”
    “But I’m back,” he said brightly.
    “Not yours,” she said. “My grandmother died.”

    They’d not found her until several days later, which was maybe the worst part. Meredith’s grandmother Olivia—Livvie—spent winters in Florida, as any sane and able retired Seattleite would, but she spent summers at home, near her daughter, her granddaughter, a whole lifetime of friends and memories and favorite places. She had an apartment in a high-rise on First Hill where she’d lived for fifty years, where Meredith’s mother and uncle had grown up, where Meredith herself had spent the best parts of her childhood. Meredith’s own parents had decamped to Orcas Island to be—and live like—artists, and Meredith had grown up with a potter’s studio and a homestead garden, windswept beaches and old fir forests, but her heart belonged in her grandmother’s old-world urban penthouse, a retreat as far as Meredith was concerned. She moved to the city first chance she got. She and her grandmother were basically neighbors.
    Meredith would go over for dinner at least one night a week, but she also often stopped by for breakfast on her way to work or met Livvie for lunch downtown or dropped in to get a skirt hemmed or deliver half a batch of whatever she’d baked or leave Livvie some soup or some cherries or a box of cookies she’d bought from somebody’s kid’s Girl Scout troop. It wasn’t that Livvie was old or infirm or too tired to manage; they just enjoyed each other’s company. But it was also not unusual for Meredith not to hear from her grandmother for a little while. They didn’t talk and visit every day. Livvie had a lot of friends, an active social life, much to do. And she was healthy but for the half pack a day. Her argument was, “It’s been sixty years. If it hasn’t killed me yet, maybe it’s good for me.”
    It wasn’t. Meredith saw her Wednesday for dinner and all was well, and they’d made plans for brunch over the weekend. She called her grandmother Friday evening and left a message that she wanted to drop off half the enormous box of tomatoes her neighbor had brought over from his garden. It didn’t occur to her until Saturday afternoon that she hadn’t heard back and they hadn’t figured out brunch for the morning—not entirely unusual but a bit unsettling still; Livvie was a busy woman, but she had a cell phone. Meredith called again, left another message and another, but by then it was late Saturday night. She finally let herself into her grandmother’s apartment on Sunday morning.
    Livvie was sitting on the sofa, reading glasses on, book in her lap, water on the coffee table undisturbed. But that was about the only aspect of the scene that was undisturbing. Meredith knew with one glance at her grandmother, knew before that even, when she opened the door to the apartment and heard no ball game on the radio, smelled no coffee or Sunday bagels, found blinds drawn and windows shut, knew before that probably, in her heart, because her grandmother was a phone call returner and a Meredith lover and a woman of her word, especially where brunch was concerned.
    An ambulance came, just to be sure. Massive heart attack, they guessed. So massive she never felt it coming. So massive she didn’t take off