“I did,” I said.

“You family?”

“No. I’m the mailman.”

He kind of squinted at me. “You still deliver out here?”

“No,” I told him. “Retired years ago.”

He looked at Ruth, then back at me, and he didn’t say anything for a second, and honestly that felt worse than if he’d said something. Because I knew what he was thinking. Where’s everybody else.

I rode along to the hospital. They wouldn’t normally let me but I think they figured somebody ought to. They got fluids in her, got her warm, said she was real lucky and real dehydrated and that another half a day might’ve been a different story. A different story. I keep chewing on that. Half a day.

She slept most of the afternoon. I just sat there in the chair. I didn’t have anywhere else to be, and I wasn’t about to leave her in a room by herself, not after she’d already been by herself for two days. Around supper time her eyes came open and she found my hand and she held it. Her grip was so weak. This was a woman who used to garden in 90 degree heat.

“Walter,” she said. I leaned in. She said, “you’re the only person who knocks.”

I told her that wasn’t true, that her kids loved her, that they’d be on the next flight. And she just looked at me, and she gave me the saddest little smile, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t argue. She didn’t say “of course they will.” She just closed her eyes.

And that’s the part I want to tell you about, because that little smile stuck with me, and I couldn’t let it go. So while she slept I did something I probably had no business doing. The hospital had her phone in a plastic bag with her glasses and her one slipper.

I asked the nurse if I could get the kids’ numbers off it to call them, and she handed it to me. It wasn’t even locked.