After the funeral, she found the notebook. Her own handwriting — a list of things she'd meant to tell him, started the year he was diagnosed.
There were forty-two items.
She hadn't intended it as a list at the time. She'd been keeping notes the way you do when you're afraid of forgetting: small moments, questions, things his stories made her think of. Tell him about the crow that figured out the compost lock. Ask about the summer he worked the boats. Tell him I understand now why he went quiet that Christmas. She'd thought she was writing notes to prompt conversation, not a record of conversation that never happened.
She kept the notebook.
Over the next year she went through it slowly, not as a project but as a habit — when she was waiting for something, when she had twenty minutes. She crossed off items that no longer seemed important, or that she realized she'd answered herself. Tell him I understand now why he went quiet that Christmas she crossed out in the second month. She'd thought she needed to say it to him. She'd been wrong about who needed to hear it.
Some items she added to. Ask about the summer he worked the boats grew a note below it: heard from Aunt Claire the boats were in Gloucester; he was 21; Claire thinks it was after the thing with the Harmons but isn't sure. Not quite the same as asking him. Something, though.
By year three the list had nineteen items remaining, six of which were questions with partial answers she'd gathered from other sources. She kept those too. Partial was not nothing.
She never finished the list. That wasn't the point, she'd come to understand. The point was that it was a record of a specific kind of wanting: not grief exactly, but the desire for particular conversations that would never happen in the form she'd imagined them. The wanting had been real. The list proved that. And some of what she'd wanted had happened sideways — in her aunt's stories, in her own silences, in what she came to understand in the absence of the conversation.
The list wasn't finished. It was finished enough.
Item twenty: Tell him I think he would have liked the crow. She left it on the list. She was still right about that.