“You must be the volunteer,” he said, and something flickered across his face when he looked at me, something I could not name then and would spend a long time trying to understand later. “Come in. I made tea. I hope you like it strong.”
I did like it strong, as it happened. That was the first of a hundred small coincidences I would only recognize as coincidences much later.
We fell into an easy rhythm over the following weeks. I came on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and Carl was always ready for me, always dressed, always with something planned. He loved board games with a passion that bordered on the childlike. We played endless rounds of backgammon and an ancient, dog-eared edition of Scrabble whose box had been taped together so many times it had lost its original color. He kept score in a little notebook, and he cheated constantly and badly, and when I caught him he would laugh so hard he had to hold his side where the pain lived.
I cooked for him because he had stopped being able to cook for himself. Simple things, mostly, soups and stews that were gentle on a body that had turned against him. He ate slowly and thanked me every single time as though I had done something remarkable rather than heated broth on a stove. I cleaned his apartment, which never really needed cleaning, because Carl was fastidious in a way that suggested a life once lived with more money and more order than his current circumstances implied. I noticed that, too, without understanding it.
What I remember most is the talking. Carl asked me questions the way a person drinks water after a long time in the desert. He wanted to know everything. Where I had grown up, what my childhood had been like, the name of the street I lived on when I was small, the color of the house, whether I had been happy. He remembered every answer. Sometimes he would circle back weeks later to a detail I had mentioned in passing and I would be startled that he had held onto it.
“You told me your mother used to sing to you,” he said once, apropos of nothing, while we sat with the Scrabble board between us and the light going gold in the windows. “What did she sing?”
I told him. An old song, half in a language I no longer spoke, the kind of thing you only remember in fragments. His eyes went wet, and he looked away, and I assumed at the time that it was the sentiment of a dying man, moved by the tenderness of a mother and child. I did not think it was anything more than that.
I should have. There were signs everywhere, if I had known how to read them. But grief for the living is its own kind of blindness, and I was too busy trying to make Carl’s last weeks bearable to notice that he seemed to already know the shape of my life before I described it to him.
