“Mr. Hops says hi.”
When she was fourteen, she told me the notes were embarrassing and to stop. So I stopped.
Two weeks later, she came home and threw her lunch bag on the counter and said, “You forgot the note.” I started again the next day.
I found out years later that she kept them. All of them. In a shoebox under her bed.
I sat up with her through strep throat. She was eight. Her fever went up to a hundred and four, and she was so hot and miserable that she couldn’t sleep. Mark was on a business trip in Chicago. I sat on the floor next to her bed all night with a cold washcloth, singing every song I
knew. When I ran out of songs, I made them up. A song about a rabbit who wanted to fly. A song about a girl who could talk to clouds.
