Last Tuesday I sat in the cardiologist waiting room with my appointment card in my lap. An old woman two chairs down started humming low to a fussy baby across the aisle. The tune stopped me cold.

I reached over and touched her sleeve without thinking.

She looked up at me slow. “Something wrong, honey?”

I pulled my hand back fast. “Sorry. That song. Where’d you learn it?”

She smiled a little. “Oh, just an old thing. Picked it up years ago on the night shift.”

The baby kept fussing and she went back to humming. Same crooked notes. Same low way of letting it trail off at the end. I had not heard it from anybody else in all these years.

Mama died in 1978. Three days it took. I was twenty five and I stayed in that room the whole time except when the nurses made me go eat something. Every night around two a young nurse would come in, pull the chair close to the bed, and sing that same lullaby. She had a soft voice, not trained or anything, just steady. Mama’s breathing would ease a bit when she heard it.

I never caught her name. She rotated off the floor the morning after Mama passed and I was too wrecked to ask anybody.

I carried that kindness like a stone in my pocket ever since. Every hospital reunion I checked the name tags, just in case. Never found her.

Back in the waiting room the old woman stopped humming again. The baby had settled some.

“You all right?” she asked me.

I nodded but I could not stop staring at her face. She had to be in her late eighties now. Her hands looked like they had done a lot of work.

“I knew a nurse once who sang that exact song,” I said. “Back in seventy eight. Little hospital outside Asheville.”

She tilted her head. “I worked there a spell. Night shift mostly.”

My mouth went dry. “Did you ever sing to a woman named Eleanor?”

She thought for a minute. “Eleanor. There was one. Pretty lady. Her girl sat right there by the bed the whole time. Wouldn’t leave even to sleep.”

That was me. I almost said it out loud but the words stuck.

The receptionist called a name and the woman with the baby got up and left. We were alone in that corner of the room except for an old man reading a magazine by the door.

The woman looked at me closer. “You remind me of that girl. Same eyes. What happened to her?”

I swallowed. “She grew up. Still misses her mama every day.”

The woman nodded like that made sense. “I used to wonder about folks after I moved on. Couldn’t stay in one place too long back then. My husband got transferred a lot.”