The box of wintergreen mints sat on the bedside table next to a plastic cup of ice water that had gone lukewarm three hours ago.

The wallpaper in room 214 of St. Jude Hospice had little pale blue anchors on it that didn’t match the institutional green of the metal door frame.

My hands felt too light.

That was the strange part about being eighty.

Your hands stop feeling like they belong to heavy things like shovels or cast-iron skillets and start feeling like dried corn husks left out on a fence rail.

Dr. Keller had come in around nine to check the charts and tell me what I already knew from the way my ribs felt like they were made of dry twigs.

He didn’t use big words because he knew I’d spent forty years running a hardware counter in Oelwein and had no patience for folks trying to sound smarter than the thermometer.

Weeks, he said.

He said it while tapping his ballpoint pen against his clipboard twice, which was his habit whenever he had to deliver news that didn’t have a fix.

They moved me down to the hospice wing on Tuesday morning because the light in the east room was better for sleeping, or at least that was what the orderly told me when he wheeled my mattress over the threshold without asking if I preferred the view of the parking lot or the brick wall.

The brick wall won.

It was red clay from up near Dubuque, old and dark where the rain had stained it over twenty winters.

I spent most of Wednesday staring at a mortar line that looked like a sideways duck.

My mind kept wandering back to things I hadn’t thought about since the Reagan administration, mostly because when you’re eighty and stuck flat on your back, your brain has nothing better to do than dig through the old boxes in the back of the shed.

I kept thinking about the stovepipe in the old farmhouse on County Road 14.

The way it used to rattle whenever the wind came out of the north off the river, sounding like someone rattling a coffee can full of stove bolts.

My husband, Dale, had put a brick on top of the tin cap to keep it from singing in a gale, but it always found a way to whistle.

That winter of 1976 was the coldest I remember since the freeze of ’59 when the milk cows had to be brought into the machine shed to keep their ears from blackening.

The snow didn’t fall down that January; it drove sideways like buckshot, scouring the paint right off the south-facing porch boards until the cedar looked like bleached bone.

I was standing at the kitchen sink scraping a wedge of lard out of a yellow mixing bowl when the back door didn’t knock so much as slump inward.

The latch on that screen door was weak, held together with a loop of copper wire I’d twisted myself after the spring wind tore the staple out of the jamb.

I didn’t think much of it at first because the wind was always playing tricks with the latch, making it bang three times fast like someone in a terrible hurry.

I wiped my thumbs on the front of my apron and walked across the linoleum, which was always cold that time of year even with the baseboard radiator hissing like a wet log in a bonfire.

When I pushed the inner wood door open, the draft hit my ankles like cold river water.

A girl was standing on the cedar mat.

She wasn’t more than sixteen, maybe seventeen if the hard years had added a couple of seasons to her face.

She wore a brown wool coat that had belonged to someone twice her size, the hem dragging in the drift against the bottom step so the wool was dark and sodden with gray slush.

Her hair was tied back with a piece of binder twine, and her lips had that bluish tint you only see on people who have walked three miles too far in a wind that can freeze the spit in your mouth.

She didn’t say a word.

She just stood there with her right hand tucked deep inside the opposite sleeve of that oversized coat, her shoulders hunched up around her ears like a turtle pulling into its shell.

“Get on in here before you turn to salt,” I said.

My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, which was just my way of keeping from dropping the lard bowl.

She didn’t move until I reached out and took hold of the sleeve of that wet coat, and when my fingers touched her wrist, it felt like holding a bird that had already given up on flying.

Her name was Clara, or at least that was what she muttered four hours later after I’d got her into a pair of Dale’s flannel trousers with the waist rolled three times and pinned with a diaper safety pin.

She sat at the kitchen table with a red-and-white checkered mug between both palms, staring down at the surface where the varnish had worn off right where Dale used to rest his elbows after cleaning his deer rifle.

“You aren’t going to call the sheriff?” she asked.

Her voice was thin, like paper that had been left out in the sun until the ink faded to gray.

“Sheriff’s got enough to do down at the courthouse without looking at people who don’t know how to dress for January,” I told her, setting a plate of fried saltines and hot broth in front of her.

“Eat that. It won’t stick to your ribs if you chew it too fast.”

She ate like she hadn’t seen grease or salt in a week, her eyes darting toward the window every time a car went by on the highway half a mile off through the trees.

The yellow room was small, tucked right under the eaves on the second floor next to the cedar chest where I kept the spare quilts and my mother’s wedding dress.

It had butter-colored paint on the plaster that I’d rolled on myself with a roller that left little gray fuzz balls in the corners because I was too cheap to buy the good brushes from the hardware store in town.

She stayed in that room for three months.

Dale didn’t say much about it when he came in from the north forty with his mackinaw stiff as a board and his eyelashes crusted with frost.

He just looked up the stairs, hung his cap on the yellow pine peg by the door, and set his lunch pail down with a dull thud.

“That girl’s big as a hay wagon,” he said, pulling his boots off by the heel without using his hands.

“She’s having a young one come April,” I said, handing him a mug of chicory coffee that was dark enough to float a horseshoe.

“Well,” Dale said, blowing across the steam until the surface rippled.

“We got room for a calf, we got room for a Christian.”

That was Dale all over.

He wasn’t a man for speeches or long letters, but he never turned away a stray dog or a neighbor whose tractor broke down during planting.

Clara didn’t talk much about where she came from, and I didn’t ask, because out where we lived, asking too many questions was like looking for a hornet’s nest with a broom handle.

She spent most of March sitting by the small gable window with a basket of quilt scraps on her knees, sewing little squares of blue cotton into a pattern her grandmother had taught her down in Missouri.

Her fingers were long and thin, and she had a habit of biting the thread instead of reaching for the little tin snips on the windowsill.

By the time the maple buds started swelling up red against the gray sky, she was walking around the kitchen like she owned the floorboards, her belly round and heavy under her apron.

The baby came on a Tuesday morning when the mud in the lane was so deep the mail carrier left the letters in the milk can by the highway.

It didn’t happen in the hospital; it happened right there on the iron bed in the yellow room with me holding a stack of clean flour-sack towels and Dale downstairs keeping the water on the stove hot so we wouldn’t run out.

The little girl came out squalling like a red-winged blackbird in the cattails, small and dark-haired with a face that looked like a peeled walnut.

Clara named her Maeve, after an aunt who had raised her in a house with no floor covering down by the river.

For three weeks, that little room smelled like boiled diapers and sweet milk, and the house didn’t feel so empty the way it usually did after the corn was all in the crib and the winter settled in for the long haul.

Then came the morning of April 14th.

I remember the date because it was the day the creamery truck broke its axle down by the bridge, and Dale had to take the tractor out to haul the cans up the grade before the milk soured in the sun.

I went up the stairs around six with a tray holding two soft-boiled eggs and a slice of rye toast with blackberry jam.

The door to the yellow room was ajar about three inches.

The light coming through the small west window was the color of skim milk, hitting the yellow wall and turning it a dirty gray.

The bed was made.

Not just empty, but made with the heavy white quilt pulled up tight and smooth over the bolster the way I’d shown her how to tuck the corners so they wouldn’t sag.

There was no note on the pillow.

There wasn’t a scrap of paper, not even the grocery receipt she usually used to mark her place in the Sears catalog she liked to look at when the wind kept her awake.

I stood there in the doorway with the tray in my hands until the yoke of the egg started to slide sideways on the toast.

I walked over to the dresser.

The little tin of lard she used for her chapped knuckles was gone.

The blue quilt scraps she’d been piecing together for three months were gone from the basket by the rocker.

Even the spare pair of wool socks I’d knitted for her from the wool off our own ewes, the ones with the dropped stitch in the heel, were missing from the bottom drawer.

I went down the stairs one at a time, watching my feet so I wouldn’t trip over the hem of my housecoat, and set the tray down on the oilcloth table.

Dale came in twenty minutes later with grease on his forehead and his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows.

He took one look at my face and didn’t ask about the eggs.

“She gone?” he asked.

“She’s gone,” I said.

“Take the truck down to the crossroads,” Dale said, reaching for his canvas jacket.

“She couldn’t have got far with a newborn in this mud.”

He drove as far as the county line, past the Lutheran church and down the gravel track toward the bottomlands where the squatters used to pitch tents during the depression.

He came back three hours later with his tires caked in red clay clear up to the fenders, and he didn’t say a word until he’d washed his hands at the pump outside.

“Nobody seen hide nor hair,” he told me, wiping his wet hands on his pants.

“Postmaster says a gray sedan with Illinois plates was parked by the grain elevator around dawn, but he didn’t pay it no mind.”

That was all we ever got.

Forty-nine years of looking at every girl with dark hair who walked into the grocery store in town, wondering if that seventeen-year-old face had grown into something else.

Forty-nine years of keeping the yellow paint fresh on those walls, even after Dale went down in the back forty with his tractor and I had to sell off the cows to pay the tax man.

I stayed in that house until my knees gave out three years ago and the county health board said I couldn’t haul my own stovewood anymore.

Now I was here in St. Jude’s with the blue anchors on the wall and the green door frame that smelled like floor wax and old cabbage.

The room was quiet except for the hum of the vending machine down the hall in the visitor lounge and the occasional rattle of an empty food cart being wheeled past by someone who didn’t care if you were sleeping or not.

The nurse came in at 7:14 on a Friday morning.

She had her hair pinned up in a twist at the back of her head, and she wore a white coat over blue scrubs that had a little embroidered patch of a stethoscope on the pocket.

Her hair had gray at the temples, right above her ears, exactly where her mother’s had been when the wind blew it loose by the woodpile back in ’76.

She didn’t look at my face first.

She looked at the plastic clip on the clear plastic tubing running into the back of my left hand, making sure the drip rate was right, twenty drops a minute, steady as a clock.

Then she reached out and turned my wrist over so she could read the black ink on the white cardboard band.

Her hand went still.

Not like she dropped something, but like someone had suddenly pulled the plug on a motor that had been running for fifty years.

She didn’t drop my arm.

She just left her thumb pressed against my pulse point right where the skin had gone thin and blue like onion skin.

She looked up from the wristband and her eyes weren’t the eyes of a hospital worker checking a room off a list.

They were Clara’s eyes.

Dark, deep-set, with that same little notch in the left iris that looked like a drop of ink had fallen where it shouldn’t have.

She leaned in close enough that I could smell peppermint and rain on her wool collar.

“It was you,” she whispered.

Her voice wasn’t thin anymore; it had the full, rich sound of a woman who had spent forty years talking to people she loved.

“The yellow room.”

She didn’t let go of my wrist, and her thumb stayed right there on my pulse, beating just a little faster than mine.

“Mama always said the woman who saved us was named Martha, and she had a stove that smelled like burnt toast every time she baked.”

I didn’t say anything for a second because my throat had gone dry as a corncrib in August.

“I still have the saltines,” was all I could get out, and my voice sounded like dry leaves scraping across a concrete walk.

She didn’t let go of my hand.

She sat down right on the edge of the mattress where the sheets were pulled tight over the rubber pad, and she didn’t care that her white coat was getting wrinkled against the blue anchors.

“She kept the quilt,” the nurse said, and her chin started to tremble just a little bit, the way Clara’s used to when the wind hit the eaves too hard.

“The blue scraps. She finished it on the porch in Illinois forty years later, and she put it on my bed every winter until she went.”

I looked past her shoulder at the red brick wall outside the window where the mortar line still looked like a sideways duck.

The room didn’t feel so small anymore.

The pale blue anchors on the wallpaper looked like they were floating on water instead of just sitting there on pasteboard.

She reached out with her other hand, the one without the stethoscope patch, and pulled the gray blanket up over my shoulder where the draft from the door had been chilling my collarbone.

“My name’s Maeve,” she said, and her thumb stayed right there on my pulse, keeping time with the drip in the tube.

“I know,” I told her.

“I had the coffee ready for you forty-nine years ago.”