The Lost Hours Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned her head to face me. “Have you seen Jackson? He always brings me flowers.”
    I stood, trying to see the grandmother who’d taught me to garden inside this woman who didn’t know who I was. I felt sorry for this old woman, yet I didn’t know her. Her presence in my life had become like a soft wind that moves your hair and then is forgotten by your next breath. I walked to the window to stare down at the pretty garden somebody had hoped would resemble an English one with geometrical patterns and precisely pruned hedges. Pink roses dotted large green bushes bordering the small square space, highlighting the trellises with climbing wisteria and white wooden benches for weary spectators. I felt sad, recalling the beautiful garden my grandmother had tended in our backyard that now lay sleeping under tired dirt.
    I remembered the small blue sweater and the manila envelope in my shoulder bag. Turning back toward the bed, I pulled out the sweater. I would wait to ask her about the key and the letters until later as I had learned that she could only absorb one thing at a time. I wasn’t really expecting her to recognize the sweater or even to reveal anything to me. But when I had been standing in my grandfather’s study the previous day, it had finally come to me how very alone in the world I was—how many years had passed since my grandmother had written that last letter. And I had to at least try.
    “Grandmother? I found something yesterday in the house, in your trunk in Granddaddy’s study, and it looks like something you might have knitted. Do you recognize it?”
    Her brown eyes blinked slowly as if trying to focus on my face and then I watched as her gaze slowly traveled to the bundle in my hands and stopped, her eyes sad and unblinking. I came closer and sat at the edge of her bed, her gaze never leaving the blue-yarn sweater. Her hand, as delicate as a fallen leaf, reached out and grabbed a fistful of the soft fabric, the blue veins in her hands like roadmaps of her life. Slowly, she pulled it toward her and buried her face in the sweater as I had done, and I wondered what memory she was smelling.
    “Do you know whose this was?”
    She didn’t respond, but kept her face buried in the sweater. After a moment her shoulders began to shake and a keening I had never heard before erupted from her, the sound bringing back to me all of my own lost hopes and dreams.
    With a hesitant hand, I touched her shoulder, appalled yet compelled to reach her as I witnessed a depth of emotion I never thought her capable of.
    “It’s okay, Grandmother. It’s going to be okay.” The words were as empty of meaning as my incessant patting on the sharp bone of her shoulder that protruded from her cotton nightgown. It wasn’t okay. And for a brief moment I wished that I had never found that sweater in the trunk or read the letters, that I had been allowed to continue in my numb existence in the quiet house on Monterey Square. But I had found the sweater and brought it here to show her. And I had remembered the words that haunted my dreams the night before, words my grandmother had told me long ago that I thought I’d forgotten. Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to. Otherwise, the lessons learned are as useless as spare buttons from a discarded shirt. And all that is left is a fading name and the shape of a nose or the color of hair.The men who write the history books will tell you the stories of battles and conquests. But the women will tell you the stories of people’s hearts.
    I thought back to my own mother, dead now for more than twenty years and how she’d left home at eighteen and never gone back. I remembered her only from an old Polaroid of her standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with my father—a picture I always thought was to show the world how very far from home she wanted to get.
    My grandmother’s sobbing stopped as abruptly as it had begun and I thought for a moment that she’d