That night, for the first time, he didn’t reach for the Salonpas patch in his nightstand drawer. He touched the fresh paint on the door instead. It was dry. Solid. Unambiguous.
His first project was the pantry. He cut white vinyl letters, each one an exact replica of the patch’s typeface. FLOUR. SUGAR. COFFEE. He stuck them to the glass canisters. Mavis would have hated it. She’d called his obsession “the font of the walking wounded.” But she wasn’t here, and the arthritis in his knuckles was.
The last thing Leonard’s wife, Mavis, had bought before the aneurysm was a Cricut machine. It sat on her craft desk like a pale pink tombstone, surrounded by rolls of unused vinyl and half-sketched ideas for “Live, Laugh, Love” decals she’d never get to cut.