The priest came and held his stiff sweaty hand. Pulled it up off the bedcovers and squeezed it. But there was no movement in the hot body or in the face that looked as if it had been run over by a tractor. The priest cajoled him. You’d swear Gussie was listening. He placed his hand on Gussie’s forehead and pressed it. Then he sighed and looked at you, Birdie, with despair in his eyes. Despair that would have destroyed a pope. The nuns brought Padre Pio’s glove. Relics for under the pillow. The nurses came every hour and changed him from one position to another. Promised a revolving bed as soon as one was free. They checked the tube that went down his throat, and shone little fountain-pen torches into his pupils, and stared at the monitor beside the bed that tracked his heartbeat, and signalled change in his temperature or blood pressure.

And all that time you sat there, Birdie! Sat in your little blue coat, with your black beret on your little grey head. Your tiny arthritic hands clasping your white, patent-leather handbag that contained the letter with the American stamp, which you couldn’t bring yourself to open.

It came ten days after the crash. Someone must have told her. A story can go round the world as fast as round a village nowadays. But you couldn’t open it. How could you open it? How could you read that? With all those people there. There was no telling what might be in a letter like that. So you deceived yourself, Birdie. You said you’d read it some other day. When things were quieter. Shame on you, Birdie!

You went home and left it on the dressing table in the bedroom. Discarded among the pills and jars of tablets and the ointments and face creams, and the antiseptic skin creams, and the scissors and combs and boxes of tissues.

You dropped it there, saying you’d bring it with you the following day when there was nobody about. But you didn’t. You knew that the chaos of a dressing table would swallow it up. You’d never notice it again.

And what were you doing, Birdie? Just by the way. What were you doing on that day when your son hit the wall?

You were cleaning. What else?

Cleaning the cutlery in the kitchen drawer. That’s where you found the scratch card, which he had sent the previous year for your birthday. The scratch card you never scratched. And so you took it out from under the forks and the knives, and you stared at it for a long time, wondering what it was. Then you remembered. And it annoyed you that he only thought it was worth his while to send you something as mean as a one-euro scratch card for your birthday. Is that all he thought about you? A scratch card!

– Hope you’ll be lucky with this – the birthday card said.

A mean sort of present, you thought, at the time. And you threw it in the drawer, saying you’d scratch it later, but knowing full well that the chaos of the knives would swallow that too, and it would vanish beneath the forks and spoons and never be seen again.