For four winters Arthur had taken a bus to the community centre. Leila volunteered there now, sorting donated clothes. He repaired loose buttons, carried boxes and made tea badly enough that the others had given him a permanent job labelling shelves instead.
He had told Nora he went for a walk on Thursdays. She pictured every rainy afternoon she had called to ask whether he needed anything. “You could have told me.”
“You were looking after everything,” he said. “I wanted one thing I could still do for somebody else.”
Nora had no quick reply. She had mistaken being informed about his life for being included in it. He had mistaken needing help for losing the right to help someone else. Between them they had made care feel like a set of instructions.
