What Del Cost Me

In the morning I go looking for the hole in me, the way you probe a tooth that's gone quiet. That's the locksmith's habit. You don't wait for a lock to fail on a customer's door — you test it while it's slow at three a.m., turn it under your own hand until you find where it'll give. So I sit on the curb with the ledger and I turn myself over, tumbler by tumbler, looking for the part that won't catch. It takes me until the streetlights die. Mended cuff. That's the shape I hung Del's name on — Marguerite's word, *mended at the left cuff*. And when I reach for how *I* know a mended cuff, how the small satisfaction of a good invisible mend feels, whose hands taught the needle to hide itself in the weave — Nothing. A clean seam where the memory used to sit. Somebody taught me to sew, once. I know they did, the way you know a room had furniture from the pale squares on the wallpaper. I can't get the face. I can't get the kitchen it happened in — but the kitchen was already gone, I paid that for Mauve, so maybe it's the same kitchen twice. Maybe I'm paying the same room off in installments, one drawer at a time, until there's no room left to bill. I write it down. *Del Overholt cost: the hands that taught me to mend.* The pen doesn't fight me. It never fights the losses. It only fights the saves. Here's the ugly arithmetic, and I make myself do it out loud so the curb can hear a fool: I told Marguerite it's lighter split two ways. I still believe that. But I never said whose two ways. She feels Del now — the ache she'd buried. And I've got a hole where a stranger's kindness used to live. We didn't halve the weight. We doubled the accounting. Two books both open. Two people both short. *Lighter* was the lie I needed to get her ribbon lifted. I don't regret telling it. I just log it as what it was. Number 12's lamp is off when I pass. First time in eleven years the window's dark before dawn — because she's not turning pages tonight. The book's still open, ribbon slack on the sideboard, marking nothing. And a book that stays open doesn't forget. Which means Marguerite is lying awake in a room that finally has a seam in it, feeling every tenant she smoothed over, all of them at once, no page to turn them under. I did that. I cracked her one working mercy so I could reach a coat three blocks north. I should feel it more than I do. That's the part I write down last, in the small hand, at the bottom: *Del cost me the mending — and something else I can't name, because I can't find the shape of caring what I did to her.* Maybe that's the real debit. Not a memory. An edge. The one that would've made me knock on her dark door this morning and say *I'm sorry* and mean it all the way through. I stand outside her house a while. I don't knock. Somewhere behind me last night's door is sitting unopened, and tonight's is twelve hours from growing, and I've got a name in my book that will outlast the whole street. Del Overholt kept a plant he called nothing. I water the memory the only way I can — I read the line again, out loud, so it holds. Then I go home to sleep, past a landlady lying awake in a house full of held pages, both of us a little emptier for a stranger neither of us will ever get to meet. The ribbon marks nothing. I'm starting to understand that's the point. You leave it marking nothing so you remember there was something there to lose.