Just Enough
The sound of a life remembered....
A Short story in Nine Chapters. When hospice doula Carla meets Thomas, an eighty-one-year-old veteran with liver cancer and a lifetime of silence, she knows the work will be delicate. Pride has hardened into quiet, and grief has sealed the rest. What begins as routine end-of-life planning becomes something deeper as Carla discovers a way in—through music. Each visit, each song, becomes an excavation of memory: the wife he loved, the life they built, the losses they buried beneath routine and restraint. As Thomas’s strength fades, the two create a kind of duet—his stories and her listening—until “Moon River” carries him home.
Tender, precise, and deeply humane, Just Enough is a story about how remembering becomes release, and how even at the end, the soul still hums its favorite song.
Chapter 1
Carla knew this one would be hard. The veterans usually were. Years of command-and-control didn’t always retire when the uniform did. Pride turned into silence. Silence turned into stone. Her job was to put a hand on the stone and find the seam, the slight crack with which to pry it all open.
All she had going in was a name and a few lines: Thomas. Eighty-one. Widower. Liver cancer. Address typed in all caps as if the building might forget where it lived. A note from intake: quiet, keeps to himself. A second note, circled: nephew? aide says complicated.
The door opened on a tall, lanky man balanced on a walker. Suspenders clipped neat as a metronome. Shirt tucked. Shoes shined, or at least remembered. His eyes did the quick assessment people do when they’re deciding what you’ll take from them—time, breath, control.
Behind him, the aide hovered, middle-aged, kind, steady. “Nelly,” she said, offering a palm-up hand like an invitation onto a dance floor. The house smelled like lemon cleaner and old paper. A radio sat dead on a side table. The blinds were half-open, letting a square of winter light cut across the rug.
“Thomas,” Carla said, and added, “I’m Carla. Hospice volunteer and end-of-life doula. I’m here to help…put a plan around what you want. May I come in?”
A beat. Then a reluctant nod. The walker squeaked once as he turned.
They made a triangle in the living room—Thomas in his chair by the window, Nelly on the arm of the sofa, Carla in the visitor’s perch that every house keeps for news, good or bad. She took out her notebook and pen and set them on her knee without opening either. First rule: don’t start by taking.
“I like to begin simple,” she said. “What feels good right now? What helps?”
“Nothing much,” Thomas said. His voice was a rusted hinge.
Nelly’s glance flicked to Carla, a tiny shake of the head at the word nephew. Not now. Maybe not ever. Carla filed it in the drawer labeled Later, gently.
“This is our first visit,” Carla continued. “The first few weeks are about getting the right people in place, making sure we know your wishes, and making it easier for you to rest. We’ll talk about comfort—music, light, routines. Food, if there’s anything you still enjoy. We’ll also talk about practicals—who’s around when you need hands. When you prefer to be alone. We’ll build a plan around that. Does that sound alright?”
Thomas lifted one shoulder. A kind of shrug that didn’t want to commit, but didn’t want to fight either.
Nelly broke the silence. “He likes the window,” she said. “Mornings, mostly. We open it a little when it’s warm.”
Carla looked. The blinds made soft bars across Thomas’s lap. Outside, a maple sketched black lines against the sky. A neighbor’s wind chime answered the breeze in a single note, over and over, like someone practicing the beginning of a song and never moving on.
“What branch?” Carla asked after a moment.
“Army,” he said.
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
A pause opened. She let it.
“Your wife?” Carla asked, softer.
“Gone.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
“Her name?”
His jaw set. The walker ticked once as his foot nudged it, a small betrayal of restlessness.
Nelly shifted. “We keep the photo there,” she said, nodding to a frame on the bookshelf. A woman in a plain dress, standing on a beach, the wind making a flag of her hair. Thomas didn’t look at it.
Carla tried a different doorway. “Tell me what a good day is now,” she said. “Not before. Now.”
He looked at the window. “Quiet,” he said. “And my music.”
“Quiet is allowed, music is even better” Carla said. “We can put that in writing, even. People forget that quiet can be part of a plan.”
He huffed something that might have been a laugh if it had more air in it.
“Okay,” she said, picking up the pen but not pressing it to paper yet. “Basics, then. Who’s on your team besides Nelly and hospice? Anyone we can call for errands, or to sit with you when Nelly’s off?”
Nelly gave a small, careful nod that meant not the nephew.
“Neighbor sometimes,” Thomas said finally. “Kid. Brings the mail if I miss it.”
“How old?” Carla asked.
“Teen. Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“What’s his name?”
Thomas squinted, as if the syllables were trying to hide. “Devin,” he said at last. “Or Devon.” He shrugged. “He whistles. All the time.”
“Whistles what?” Carla asked, almost lightly.
Thomas’s mouth moved before the sound did. “Old stuff,” he said. “Standards.”
Carla let that sit on the table between them like an unexpected bowl of fruit. Standards. She looked at the radio, at the way Thomas’s right thumb tapped a slow, unconscious beat against the walker’s handle. One-two, one-two-three.
“We’ll put Devin on the list,” she said. “And the window. We’ll make them both part of the plan.”
“Window,” he repeated, as if testing the word for chips. He adjusted the suspenders with a precise tug. “Not too much air. Just enough.”
“Just enough is good,” Carla said. “Just enough can be everything.”
She flipped the notebook open now, slow. “I’ll ask you a few questions so we can start the paperwork and make sure people know your preferences. If you want to skip anything, we skip it.”
Thomas nodded once, grudging but present.
Carla drew a breath. “Alright, Thomas. Let’s do the basics together.”
The dialogue that followed had the shape of conversation without the ease of it.
“Full name?”
“Thomas Edward Pike.”
“Preferred name?”
“Thomas is fine.”
“Primary contact?”
“Nelly,” he said, before Nelly could. “She knows the meds.”
“Allergies?”
“Shellfish,” he said. “And…people who talk too much.”
Carla lifted her eyes. “Noted.”
“Do you have a faith community?”
“No.”
“Any music you like during the day?”
“Radio’s broke. But I have my record player.”
“What do you listen to?”
He stared at the window long enough that she almost moved on. “Sinatra,” he said. “Maybe Bennett.”
“Volume?”
“Low.”
“Window open?”
“Some,” he said. “Just enough. Not too much”
She wrote it down exactly like that: Some. Just enough.
When they finished the forms that had to be finished, Carla closed the notebook and rested her palm on the cover. “We’ll keep this simple,” she said. “Quiet mornings with the window. Radio fixed if we can. Devin for mail and whistling. Nelly in charge of meds. Just enough. Not too much.”
Thomas looked at her hand on the notebook as if she’d put a lid on something dangerous. Then he followed his gaze to the window again. Outside, the wind chime gave that same single note and stopped.
“What else?” he asked, and Carla heard the tiniest crack in the stone.
“Later,” she said. “We’ll take it in steps. Today is just the basics, the frame.”
He nodded. A small, square of acceptance clicked into place.
As she stood to go, Nelly walked her to the door and lowered her voice. “The nephew” she said, “is a later problem.”
“I figured,” Carla said. “We’ll make room for later.”
On the porch, the cold bit clean. Carla looked back through the glass and saw Thomas turn his chair an inch toward the window, then another inch, as if finding the angle that let him see and not be seen. Not too much air. Just enough.
She put “window” at the top of her next-visit list and, under it, one word: music.
Chapter 2
The next morning, once the coffee had burned a clean line through the fog, Carla thought about Thomas. The pride. The stoicism. That stubborn self-reliance that felt stamped into the bone—military issue, lifelong. None of it surprised her.
The music did.
Sinatra. Bennett. Standards. That small lift in his voice when he said the names. There might be a door there, she thought. Not a wide one. A crack. Enough to get a fingertip in.
She checked his chart again. Metastatic liver cancer. A month since the terminal diagnosis. Months left, not years. Maybe six. Maybe four. Maybe fewer if infection or a fall had opinions of their own. The work ahead was the same and never the same: orient, onboard, soften the edges of the days, build a plan that fit him the way an old jacket fits the shoulder. And then, if he would allow it, life review.
Life review was where she felt most like a craftsperson. Not a therapist, not a chaplain—though at any given moment she might borrow their tools—but a maker. Taking what the person gave her, finding the right frame, setting the glass just so. The trick wasn’t to make the picture prettier. It was to keep her own reflection out of it.
She thought of her last case, which tended to walk through her mornings uninvited anyway. Claire. Two years on hospice. Unusual, a rarity that made the nurses hedge their bets and their language. A feeding tube that kept the body going long past the heart’s first announcement that it was tired. It had rubbed Carla the wrong way at first—she believed in a death with as little intervention as possible. The body knows how to die. You make a nest; you keep the pain quiet; you let nature take her knitters’ needles and do their slow, competent work.
But Claire had taught her something. Their life review had not been a straightforward interview. It had been a guided meditation, rehearsed and revised, almost a liturgy. Every week they walked the same imagined path: the creek behind Claire’s grandmother’s house; the stone with the flat top; the way the sun struck the clothesline. Claire’s voice grew softer as her body grew thinner, but the vision stayed bright. They did it for nearly two years. In the end, when language was mostly air, Claire’s hands still traced the path in the blanket. It had been, despite Carla’s initial resistance to the tube and the machines and the timers, one of the most sacred pieces of work she’d been allowed to do.
Maybe with Thomas, the path would be music. Not questions he could dodge. Songs he couldn’t help but answer.
She called Nelly and set the second visit. Same time. Morning light. “We’ll try something simple,” she said. “Four songs. Low volume. Window—some, not too much.”
Nelly chuckled softly. “He will like that.”
Carla packed a small speaker, a legal pad, and a pencil that would not click. She made herself a short list on an index card: Sinatra ballad. Bennett classic. Something with strings. Something with a swing. She resisted the urge to overthink the order. Let the room decide, she told herself. Let Thomas decide without asking him to.
When she arrived, the house felt slightly changed. The lemon cleaner again, yes, but a hint of something warm—toast?—and the faintest buzz of a radio not yet turned on. Thomas was in his chair by the window, the blinds tilted to slice the light into manageable pieces. Suspenders, shirt, the same careful uniform. He glanced at the speaker in her hand and then at the window, as if confirming it wasn’t a medical device.
“Morning,” she said. “I brought a bit of company for the quiet.”
He lifted one shoulder. Permission.
Nelly hovered in the doorway to the kitchen. “I will make tea,” she said, which meant she would be near enough to hear if something went wrong and far enough to pretend not to.
Carla set the speaker on the low table and cued the first track. A trumpet eased itself into the room, the strings following like someone opening a curtain. She kept the volume low enough that the hum of the refrigerator could still be heard.
Thomas didn’t move at first. Then his right thumb began to tap on the walker handle. One-two. One-two-three. Not showy. Exact.
She watched his face in profile rather than straight on. People sometimes felt freer to feel if they weren’t being watched doing it. On the last eight bars, he breathed with the singer, the way people do who have listened to a song enough times to know where air lives.
“Too loud?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Just enough,” he said.
Song two. A piano this time. A city at night. The kind of melody that draws a line down the middle of the chest and asks you to walk it. Thomas’s mouth moved. Not words at first—shapes. Then, quietly, as if speaking not to her but to the radio, he sang. It wasn’t volume that surprised her. It was accuracy. He came in on the verse, not the chorus. He hit the turn at the bridge without fumbling. He landed the last note like he knew where the floor was.
Carla didn’t look at him. She made a note on her legal pad: Sings. Knows structure. Training? Church? Band? Then she put the pencil down. Don’t turn a person into a syllabus.
Song three. The swing he’d hinted at with that subtle metronome thumb. His heel found the beat this time, toes whispering the time into the rug. On the second chorus he let the lyric out, almost under his breath, a private accompaniment. It put a prickle behind her eyes that she pressed back with the heel of her hand.
Nelly slipped in and set a mug on the table and didn’t comment on the singing. Her face did a small thing, though—unlocked, just a little—and Carla filed it under evidence.
“Last one,” Carla said. “Then we rest.”
She chose a track with a violin that walked alongside the voice like a companion that knew when to keep quiet. The first line brought Thomas’s eyes to the window, not because something outside had changed, but because something inside had. He sang along without hurrying, his mouth barely open, as if he were afraid the notes might escape into the cold.
When the song ended, the house settled into itself. The wind chime on the porch tried the single note it knew and gave up.
Carla reached for the speaker but didn’t turn it off yet. “Four songs,” she said. “Four out of your albums.”
“Not mine,” he said, and then, a beat later, “Well. Mine now.”
“Would you like to do this again?” she asked. “Same day next week. Maybe two days. We could make a sort of…playlist of the life. We can put it in the plan.”
He looked at the radio—silent still—and then at the blinds. “Two days,” he said. “If we keep it easy.”
“Easy is the plan,” she said. “Window. Low volume. Tea. Not too much.”
He gave the smallest of smiles. It changed his whole face.
Carla picked up her pencil, wrote the schedule, then set it down again. “When you listen,” she said, careful, “does any one song belong to a place? A person? We don’t have to talk about it now. I’m only asking where we might look.”
He hesitated. The stubbornness—the stone she’d met on day one—didn’t vanish, but it shifted. She could feel it. He tapped the walker once. “Maybe the beach,” he said. “Maybe…her.” He nodded, almost imperceptibly, toward the photograph on the shelf.
“Okay,” Carla said. “Then one day we’ll take the beach. We’ll only take what you want to carry.”
He nodded again.
After she packed the speaker and finished the tea, Nelly walked her to the door. “He sang,” Nelly said in a whisper meant to be a secret and an announcement at once. “I have not heard that.”
Carla smiled. “I think there’s more music in him than he wanted us to know.”
On the porch, the air met her face—brisk, but not unfriendly. Through the glass, she watched Thomas turn his chair another inch toward the window, just enough to catch the slice of sky. His lips were moving, shaping a melody that didn’t need anyone else to know it to be real.
Carla added one word to the top of next week’s list, above music, above window: voice.
Chapter Three
By the fourth visit, the room had started to remember her.
The chair near the window no longer looked borrowed, and Thomas no longer eyed the speaker like a piece of medical equipment disguised as art.
He still resisted questions, but not her company.
Carla learned his rhythms—the time it took for him to clear his throat before answering, the small nod that meant yes, the smaller one that meant maybe later.
Sometimes they sat in silence long enough for the light to change colors.
“Four songs again?” she asked, setting her bag down.
He considered, then said, “Three. The good ones.”
They began with Bennett. A ballad he said was “too sweet,” but he hummed anyway.
By the second track, his tapping thumb had returned, keeping time against the walker’s handle.
She waited for it—the shift. The point where music softened his defenses.
When it came, it wasn’t with the song she expected.
It was a quiet swing tune, nothing special, but something about the phrasing—the horns, maybe—pulled him somewhere else. His hand lifted, hovered, then settled.
“That one,” he said.
She didn’t speak.
“That was playing the night I met her,” he said after a long pause. “At the armory dance. I was supposed to be on watch but—” He stopped. The corner of his mouth folded into something that might have been a smile. “She said later I looked like I was guarding the punch bowl.”
Carla smiled, but kept her gaze soft, peripheral.
“What was her name again?” she asked, though she knew it from the chart.
“Eleanor,” he said. The name landed in the room like a note that finally found its pitch.
He went on in fragments—how she’d worn a blue dress with tiny pearl buttons, how she’d taken his hand before he could offer it, how they’d danced to the wrong song and made it look right.
He told it as if testing whether the story could still hold.
When he faltered, she prompted gently, “What did she say when you asked her to dance?”
He chuckled, low in his chest. “Didn’t ask. She did.”
That made her laugh, and for a moment the years between then and now collapsed—just two people sitting in a sun-cut room, listening to a memory hum through the air.
After a while, he said, almost to himself, “I thought if I remembered her right, maybe she’d come back a little.”
Carla reached for the notebook, then stopped.
“No need,” she said softly. “We’ll keep it right here.”
He nodded. “You’ll forget.”
“I won’t,” she said. “That’s the job.”
He looked at her then, really looked, and she felt the shift—the stone easing, the seam found.
When she left, he didn’t turn the radio off.
Through the porch glass she heard the faint thread of the same song, looping back to the beginning.
Inside, Thomas sat facing the window, his hand keeping time on the walker, one-two, one-two-three—
the rhythm of remembering, steady and alive.
Chapter 4
The next visit, he was already waiting.
The blinds were half-drawn, the window cracked just enough to prove he still had a say in the matter.
The record player sat on the low table like a guest expecting tea.
“I brought something different today,” Carla said, setting the stack of vinyl down.
He nodded toward the records. “We’ll see.”
They started with ‘I Could Write a Book.’
The first few bars came through soft and scratchy, a voice too young to know what it was promising.
Thomas’s hand found the tempo without thinking.
“That one,” he said. “That’s the one she liked.”
“She?” Carla prompted, though she already knew.
“Eleanor,” he said, as if correcting her manners. “She said that song was trouble—makes you think you can rewrite what’s already done.”
He smiled to himself. “She wasn’t wrong.”
He told it slowly, piece by piece, the way some people unwrap china.
They’d met at the armory dance, yes, but it was the weeks after that mattered—the way she’d walked home from the drugstore just to pass his post, the sandwich she’d wrapped in wax paper and handed through the fence, the first letter he’d ever received that wasn’t from his mother.
The letter was short, he said. Two sentences.
Don’t be brave. Be careful.
He’d kept it folded in his wallet until the leather gave out.
The next song began—strings and swing—and he kept talking, voice syncing with the rhythm.
The wedding, he said, was small. Her mother cried the whole time. His father didn’t come.
He said it like a list, facts cleaned of emotion, but Carla heard the pause that followed.
“She was beautiful,” she said.
“Too smart to be,” he said. “Married me anyway.”
He looked toward the window then, his reflection thin in the glass. “We thought there’d be kids. Wasn’t in the cards.”
He gave a half-smile that didn’t travel to his eyes. “Bad hand, I guess.”
Carla didn’t fill the silence. She knew that tone—the one people use when grief has been packed away so long it forgets it’s allowed to speak.
“Did you ever talk about it?” she asked finally.
“Not much,” he said. “What was there to say? We tried. We waited. The waiting turned into living. After a while, you stop expecting the dealer to come back to the table.”
He chuckled, soft and dry. “We got good at pretending we’d planned it that way. Travel, friends, nieces, nephews. We were fine. Really.”
Carla knew better than to call the bluff. “She sounds steady.”
“She was the steady one,” he said. “I was the noise.” Which was a funny way of describing a man so quiet it hurt.
He leaned back, let the next song fill the space where the truth might have gone.
It was another ballad—quiet, lingering, unhurried.
While he listened, she watched his fingers move against the arm of the chair, tracing a rhythm that didn’t match the music. Something private. Something remembered.
When the record ended, he didn’t ask her to play another.
He just said, “That’s enough for today.”
Carla nodded. “Alright.”
But as she gathered her things, he added, “Next time, bring something from the fifties. Early. Before they started making everything sound the same.”
She smiled. “Deal.”
Chapter 5
When Carla arrived, the records were already waiting.
Five of them, stacked beside his chair, sleeves thin at the edges, paper gone soft from handling.
Thomas’s eyes tracked them the way some people look at family photographs—wary, protective, a little proud.
“I did some sorting,” he said. “These are the ones that lasted.”
He didn’t mean the vinyl.
Carla set her bag down on the same spot as always, just far enough from his chair to give him the choice of conversation or silence.
“Would you like to start with one?” she asked.
He nodded toward the second record. “That one.”
She slid it out of the sleeve, careful not to add new scratches to the old ones. The first notes crackled through the speaker—a bright horn, then a swell of strings that sounded like summer.
“Road-trip song,” he said.
“Where to?”
“Maine. We used to drive up every August. Eat fried clams. She liked the smell of the tide. Said it reminded her that the world was still doing what it was supposed to, no matter what we were doing.”
He smiled, small and sideways. “We didn’t take pictures. Said it made things look posed. We’d just drive till we found a place with pie.”
He leaned back, eyes half-closed. “There was a stretch of road where the trees bent over like a tunnel. She’d always take my hand there. Didn’t matter who was driving.”
Carla could picture it—the narrow road, the tunnel of green, two hands meeting in the dark part before the light opened again.
“Was that the same summer you were married?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Later. Years later. After we stopped waiting for the next big thing to happen.”
He paused, let the next verse fill the space between them. “Wasn’t in the cards, kids. We tried for a while. She cried more than I did, but not for long. Said maybe we weren’t meant to raise anyone but each other.”
He looked at his hands. “Bad hand, I guess.”
Carla waited a beat, then said softly, “You still played it.”
“Every year,” he said. “We called it our losing streak.”
He chuckled, and the laugh turned into something gentler. “But we were lucky. Most people don’t get fifty years of the same joke.”
He asked for the next record. She played it without looking at the label. A brushed snare, a lazy trumpet—something domestic and content.
“That’s the kitchen song,” he said. “We’d dance while the sauce burned.”
“She sounds like she let things burn often.”
“She said it made the house smell like living.”
They sat with that. The song drifted toward its fade-out, and for a while the only sound was the window creaking against its latch.
Carla studied the line of his shoulders, the way memory seemed to lift them, as though the years had been folded away and could be unpacked in the right light.
When the record ended, he didn’t ask for another.
“She had a way,” he said finally. “Of making everything seem like it was happening on purpose.”
He looked at the window, the light beyond it thin and winter-pale.
“After she was gone, that stopped.”
Carla wanted to reach out, to rest a hand on the walker handle, but she knew better. Touch too early could break the spell.
Instead she said, “Maybe the songs remember it for you.”
He nodded, eyes still on the glass.
“Maybe they do.”
Later, in her car, Carla let the silence stretch before starting the engine.
She’d learned not to rush it. The drive home always carried the residue — echoes of other people’s songs, the scent of other people’s kitchens. Today it was the faint ghost of tomatoes and brass, and that line he’d said so simply: Maybe we weren’t meant to raise anyone but each other.
She wrote it on the back of her visit log before it could slip away.
Not as a note for the file, but as a reminder. A sentence like that didn’t belong in paperwork. It belonged to the air, the same way music did.
Life review, she thought, was a little like tuning a piano that hadn’t been played in years.
Each story brought one note back into pitch.
At first the sound was rough, hesitant. Then, if you stayed long enough, it began to find harmony again.
Thomas was finding his.
The stories were coming in sequence now — the natural order memory prefers.
Not the sharp edges of war or loss yet, but the middle years, the ordinary scaffolding that keeps a life upright.
She knew what would come next. It was always the same pattern, even if the details changed:
The meeting.
The marriage.
The middle.
The end.
The meaning.
He was three chapters in. The next one would hurt.
She made a note for herself, discreet but deliberate: Prepare for grief work.
That meant longer pauses. Softer questions. More time between visits if needed.
She’d need to build a bridge between remembrance and release — the place where nostalgia turns into surrender.
On the seat beside her, the small stack of records leaned against her bag. Thomas had insisted she take one.
“For reference,” he’d said, as though it were homework.
She’d protested — they weren’t hers — but he’d waved a hand. “Doesn’t belong to anyone anymore.”
She touched the worn cardboard sleeve now, tracing the faint indent of a name written in pen. Eleanor.
The ink had faded, but the groove of it remained.
It struck her then — how memory outlives matter.
How people like Thomas leave behind their own music, waiting for someone to come along and play it back into being.
Tomorrow she would listen to the record.
Not to pry. To remember with him.
To find the next seam.
Chapter 6
The next morning, the sky was the color of pewter.
Carla drove through it slowly, the heater working hard, the record Thomas had loaned her on the passenger seat. She hadn’t meant to listen the night before, but the needle had found its way to the groove almost by itself.
She’d sat on the couch in the dark, letting the horn section lift and fall, imagining the two of them — Thomas and Eleanor — in the kitchen, sauce burning, a dance half-finished but never really over.
By the time she reached his street, she knew today would be the day.
Grief had its own weather; she could feel the barometric drop before the door even opened.
Nelly let her in, finger pressed to her lips. “Rough night,” she whispered. “Didn’t sleep much.”
Thomas was in his chair, a blanket over his knees, the radio on but turned to static — as though he’d tried to find something and lost the station halfway there.
Carla crossed the room quietly. “Would you like me to turn it off?”
He shook his head. “Leave it. Reminds me I’m still here.”
She sat in her usual chair, the record on her lap. “I brought this back.”
He looked at it for a long time before speaking. “Keep it,” he said. “I don’t have anything to play it on anymore.”
There it was — the first note of finality.
Not about the record, but about everything.
She set it on the table instead. “Tell me about her,” she said softly. “About the end.”
He didn’t answer right away. The static filled the space between them like a low wind.
Then, finally: “Wasn’t much of an end. Not like they tell you. One day she couldn’t finish her coffee. Next day she couldn’t stand the smell of it. By the time the doctor said the word, we already knew.”
He paused, looking past her, past the window.
“She was braver than me,” he said. “Told me to stop trying to fix what wasn’t broken. Said we’d had our time. Fifty-one years. Who gets that?”
His hand trembled once on the blanket, then stilled.
“I thought I’d go first,” he said. “Men usually do. But she…”
He shook his head, the sentence unfinished.
Carla let the silence work.
He needed space to feel the shape of what he’d just said.
When he spoke again, his voice had softened. “I used to sit by her bed and hum those same damn songs. Couldn’t remember the words half the time. She didn’t care. She said it helped her know where she was.”
He smiled, faintly. “She said music’s just another kind of map.”
Carla felt that line settle into her like a stone in water — quiet, heavy, final.
She wrote nothing down.
She didn’t need to.
They sat a long time without talking. The static thinned, faded, and the house began to sound like itself again — the clock, the pipes, the steady breath of a man who’d finally told the hardest part.
When she stood to leave, Thomas reached for her wrist, just enough pressure to be felt.
“Next time,” he said, “bring that song about the moon. The one she liked.”
“Moon River,” Carla said.
He nodded. “That’s the one.”
On the porch, Carla drew in the cold air until her throat ached.
The work had a way of getting under her ribs — not grief exactly, but the echo of it.
She thought about Eleanor’s invisible map, and about Thomas tracing it still, one memory at a time.
She pulled out her notebook, flipped past the old notes, and wrote just one line for the next visit:
Song as map. Moon River. Keep the window open. Just enough. Not too much.
Chapter 7
The next week, the air had turned soft again.
Not warm, exactly — but less brittle, as if the season had taken a small breath.
Carla arrived early. She always did when she knew it would matter.
Through the screen door she could hear the hum of the oxygen machine, the slow shuffle of Nelly in the kitchen.
Thomas was in his chair, as always, but the posture had changed.
Not collapsed, not defeated — more like surrender.
The kind that comes from knowing the work is nearly done.
“I brought the song,” Carla said, holding up her phone.
He nodded, eyes already at the window. “Let’s hear it, then.”
She placed the small speaker on the table between them and pressed play.
The opening notes drifted out — that quiet river of strings, that voice that still sounded like youth.
Thomas’s hand began its old rhythm on the arm of the chair. One-two. One-two-three.
Not keeping time this time — keeping memory.
“That was our song,” he said.
His voice didn’t shake. It was too tired for shaking.
“We played it at the wedding. She said it made her feel like the world was still big.”
Carla let him talk.
He didn’t look at her, and she didn’t need him to.
“She loved rivers,” he said. “Not to swim in — just to sit beside. Said you could tell everything you needed to know about life by watching one. The way it carries what it can, lets go of what it can’t.”
The song swelled at that line — as if the music itself agreed.
“She picked this one for the end, too,” he added. “Asked me to play it. Said it would help me remember the current goes both ways.”
Carla’s throat caught, but she kept her voice even. “What do you think she meant by that?”
He smiled — a ghost of the younger man she’d only ever heard about.
“That maybe she’d still find her way back. Or maybe I’d find mine.”
He was quiet a long time after that. The song looped once, then again.
On the third repetition, he started humming — low, nearly inaudible — until his voice found the words.
Two drifters, off to see the world...
Carla closed her eyes, not to cry, but to bear witness without intruding.
It wasn’t a performance. It was communion.
When the song ended, neither of them moved. The room held its breath.
Then Thomas said, “That’s enough.”
She nodded. “Alright.”
He turned his head slightly toward her. “You ever notice,” he said, “how some songs don’t end? They just fade out, like they’re still going somewhere you can’t hear?”
“I have,” she said.
He smiled again. “That’s how I’d like it. No stopping. Just... fade.”
Carla reached out and rested her hand lightly on his wrist — just enough contact to anchor them both.
“Alright, Thomas,” she said. “We’ll make sure of it.”
He nodded once, satisfied. Then looked back toward the window.
Outside, the wind had shifted the branches so that the light came in clean and gold.
That night, Carla wrote her visit note in the softest ink she owned.
No bullet points, no charting, no vitals. Just a single line:
He sang. The current goes both ways.
Chapter 8
It happened on a Tuesday morning.
The kind of pale, ordinary day the world rarely saves for endings.
Nelly was the one who called. “He’s close,” she said. “He asked for you.”
Carla was already halfway out the door before she hung up.
She’d learned over the years that no one can time a passing, but sometimes a person waits — for the right song, the right silence, the right witness.
The house was dim when she arrived. The blinds half-open, the way he liked them.
The window cracked. Just enough. Not too much.
Thomas was in the bed now, moved from the chair a few days before.
He looked smaller, but still himself — the same careful line of jaw, the same neat collar even on the hospital gown.
Nelly sat by the bedside, one hand on the blanket.
“He was talking about rivers again,” she whispered.
Carla nodded, set down her bag, and took out the small speaker.
“I brought the song.”
Thomas’s eyes opened at the sound of her voice.
It took a moment, but then he smiled — a faint curve, recognition through fog.
“You ready?” she asked.
He managed a breath that almost sounded like yes.
She pressed play.
The room filled with that old, familiar current — the soft swell of strings, the voice that had carried him through so much living.
Thomas’s hand moved once, searching for the rhythm, and Carla guided his fingers gently to the pulse at his wrist.
“Here,” she said. “That’s your tempo.”
For a few minutes, the music and his breathing matched — in, out, measure for measure.
When the bridge came, his lips began to shape the words.
Two drifters, off to see the world...
The voice was barely there, just air and memory, but it was enough.
The air in the room shifted — that subtle, unmistakable quiet that happens right before a person lets go.
Not silence exactly, but stillness, like the world itself was holding its breath.
Carla stayed with him through it.
Her hand on his, the song winding softly toward its fade.
On the last note, he exhaled once, a long, almost musical sigh — and then nothing more.
The strings carried on for a few seconds, looping gently, like the river he’d loved:
carrying what it could, letting go of what it couldn’t.
Carla didn’t stop the music.
She let it play out, the sound thinning, softening, until even the fade was gone.
Nelly was crying quietly beside her.
Carla reached over, turned down the speaker, and whispered, “He got his wish.”
Outside, the maple branches shifted in the wind, brushing against the windowpane.
The light moved across the room in slow gold waves.
Later, in her report, Carla wrote only three words:
Moon River. Faded. Peaceful.
Then, in the margin, almost to herself:
Some songs don’t end. They just go on where we can’t hear them.
Chapter 9
Two weeks later, Carla sat at her kitchen table with the record in front of her.
She hadn’t played it since the morning he died.
The sleeve still smelled faintly of dust and lemon cleaner—and of something else she couldn’t quite name. Not grief exactly. More like the trace of a presence that had settled somewhere in her and decided to stay.
Outside, a slow rain brushed against the windows, steady and indifferent. She thought of Thomas watching the same kind of rain from his window, the way his fingers had kept time even at the end. She caught herself doing it now—thumb against table, one-two, one-two-three—and smiled.
She took the record from its sleeve and held it up to the light.
The grooves shimmered like water—each ring a memory, circling inward, forever returning to its start.
She set it on the turntable, lowered the needle, and waited for the first note.
The trumpet, the strings, the familiar ache of that old melody.
Carla leaned back in her chair, eyes closed.
She could almost hear him there—not singing this time, just listening, as he always had—to the music doing what the living can’t: going on.
When the song reached its fade, she didn’t lift the needle.
She let the silence stretch, the record spinning on long after the sound was gone.
It felt like breath after prayer, or the space between heartbeats—proof that something had been there, and might still be.
That was the lesson, she thought—the one he’d left her without ever naming it.
That stories, like songs, don’t end. They move from one voice to another.
She looked at her hands—the same hands that had held his wrist for the last beat, that had written his words, his memories, into her notes—and she felt the faint rhythm of him still there. Not haunting. Continuing.
Carla reached out and rested her hand lightly on the edge of the table, as if to steady something invisible.
The world outside was still moving—rain falling, rivers running—carrying what they could, letting go of what they couldn’t.
And in that quiet pulse beneath it all, she realized she was keeping time for him now.
His song. His stories. The current that goes both ways.
Somewhere, beyond what could be heard, the record spun on.
Just enough.
Not too much.