“Miss Trudy, you got some mail! It’s been ages, hasn’t it? I can open it for you. Do you want me to open up your mail for you? Maybe it’s a birthday card!”

Gertrude had corrected Kathy on more than one occasion about her name. There had only been two people in the world allowed to call her Trudy. Kathy wasn’t one of them.

“Must be a bill of some sort,” Gertrude mumbled.

Kathy walked over to the bed, handed her the envelope. She smelled like melons. Not the melons that passed for the peaked fruit salad here, but the honeydew Gertrude’s mother used to grow in her garden in Linz. Gertrude remembered being barefoot as a little girl, getting her toes tangled in the vines as they twisted in the ground, the cool, fertile soil under the soles of her feet. She thought of these memories often, the ones from before the war. Those old memories made her feel less alone, not so far away from the country of her birth, the homeland she hadn’t visited in over a decade.

She took the envelope, studied its exterior. Her few senile friends had conveniently lost her address over the years, somehow removed Gertrude from their holiday card lists after she landed at Pretoria. It was as if moving to a nursing home was akin to moving to a cemetery.

The envelope had been forwarded from her former home on Foster Street, the apartment she’d lived in for her entire adult life, had inherited from her aunt. The return address was USA. Georgia. Her second cousin’s children lived in Virginia, but they’d never mailed her a letter before. They sent her emails, which she checked and responded to the few times she could remember her password.

Kathy eyed the letter, waited for Gertrude to open it in front of her. Gertrude had given up any semblance of privacy living in this place. She wanted to preserve at least this.

“Thank you for bringing it, Kathy. But I can take it from here.”

Kathy flashed a pout before stepping away from Gertrude’s bed. “Alright, Miss Trudy. I’ll be down the hall if you need anything.” She hung on the doorknob a moment longer to see if Gertrude would change her mind, if she wanted a companion to open a letter with a foreign address. There was so much drab routine here, so little to look forward to, the staff and the patients brightened at the most mundane of things. Gertrude almost felt sorry for her.