When my voicemail is full, hers is the last one left after the purge. I delete my husband asking when will I be home, or that we need milk; the pool guy confirming our appointment; my cousin Jen checking in about the Block Island trip. I’m clearing room for other important messages to come, although they come less often now when everyone texts than when Vera was dying.

“Cass,” she says in a weakened version of herself but still vital, determined to connect, “I want to talk to you. I know why you stay away—the cancer, it’s scary—but call me.”

I don’t. I didn’t. Why not, when I loved her so? How busy could I have been? With no job but family and households to manage. Not like now, with businesses to run, council duties, grand-baby. I told myself I was busy. I would visit when I could take time to linger like we used to, when I walked Aengus downriver to her little yellow house with the moss-green trim where the river flows straight to the eel weir. I would walk around back to find her lounging on the daybed, papers around her, colorful Kantha cloths and pillows propping her up. Her eyes would widen and her mouth turn up in a pixie smile. “Come in! Put on some tea or would you like a whiskey?” 

I knew her from her books before I knew her. I read them aloud to my children in the summer in our little bungalow in the Catskills. I imagined being on the river in a red canoe for three days, but when I took my children camping by the Willowemoc for one night, I realized I wasn’t cut out for that kind of adventure. She always was, having lived on a houseboat for a time. When we learned she lived in our little upstate town, it felt like finding a treasure. She warmed to me and my ginger-haired children easily. 

When she stopped driving, in her 80s, we drove to the city together, talking all the way. She still had her little Jane Street apartment, with its backyard patio garden. I made a mental note to be like her in my 80s.

That last summer, there were always people visiting. The hospice folks, family, friends. I told myself she didn’t need me. But she said it was because of the cancer. Like I was afraid or something. Was I?

Now, I want to know what she wanted to say. She knew everything about me. I had no filters then, with her. She had few, if any, with me. A generation stood between us, but we didn’t let it. We talked about our men, our children, our missteps, so many. The Peace movement, wars, elections. We loved the changing seasons, watched and weighed in on them all from her enclosed porch, the eagles returning in summer, kayakers with and without life vests, the frozen waterfall in winter. She showed me her manuscripts, complained about the new writers, the publisher’s need for one more book. Money. When you can talk about money with a friend, you know they are true. 

If she were still here I would tell her what my gynecologist just revealed. That without estrogen, your external genitals can disappear. Or maybe she would have warned me before it happened. Without her, I tell everyone I know.