Two Hundred and Twelve

They sat in Julian's car in the parking lot afterward, the gas station flowers wilting between them on the dash, neither of them in a hurry to turn the key.

"You did that really well," Julian said. "The letting-her-be-however-she-needed-to-be part. I don't think I could've stood there and not tried to fix it."

"It's the job," Mara said. "Two hundred and eleven times over, it's always the job. You don't fix the dying. You don't fix the grieving. You just make sure nobody has to do either one alone if they don't want to." She looked at the physical therapy sign, gold letters catching the last of the afternoon. "I think that might be the whole of what my mother was trying to say, underneath everything. She just never learned how to do it for herself. Only for strangers, from a careful distance, decades late."

"And now?"

"Now I have three letters left in the box, and a man who drove four hours with gas station flowers because I said the word come." She turned to look at him properly, for the first time all afternoon not thinking about her mother at all. "I'm trying to be the kind of person who says the true thing while there's still time to say it. I'm out of practice."

"So practice," Julian said. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere fast."

She didn't kiss him in the parking lot of a physical therapy office on the worst-best day of her adult life, though she considered it, and filed the considering away the way she'd once filed a dog's name for thirty-one years — except this time on purpose, something to come back to on a Tuesday that wasn't going to go wrong.

"Three letters," she said instead, starting the car. "Then I'll have time to find out."