She had chosen the morning rather than the afternoon because by the afternoon she already knew.
The kitchen was exactly as she remembered it and not at all. The light was the same: that particular angle of June sun across the counter, the way it hit the white tile and turned it almost yellow. The smell she had not expected. She had forgotten how the kitchen smelled, and then it was there and she had not forgotten at all, only lost access to it, and now here it was, and she stood in the corner by the refrigerator and did not move.
Her mother was making coffee. She was 74, which Niv kept forgetting and then re-learning each time she looked at her. The movements were her mother's movements, unhurried, with the quality of someone performing a long-known task without thinking about it, the kind of ease that comes from a thousand repetitions. The coffee maker filled. Her mother stood at the window and looked out at the garden.
The garden was overgrown. Niv had not remembered that it was already overgrown by then. She had been visiting every three or four weeks and somehow not registering the garden, which her mother had maintained for thirty years and which was now, clearly, past what one person could manage. Her mother stood at the window and looked at it with an expression Niv had no name for.
Then her mother turned and went to the small notepad on the counter, the one she kept for shopping lists. She wrote something. Not a list, one or two lines. She tore the sheet from the pad, folded it, and put it under the salt shaker.
Niv was across the kitchen. She could not read it from there.
She had searched for a note after. Not knowing there was one to look for, just going through the kitchen things in those first strange weeks when everything felt like it might contain information. She had not found anything under the salt shaker. She did not know if someone had moved it or if her mother had taken it back later in the day, if there had been a later in the day of another intention entirely.
The coffee finished. Her mother poured a cup and sat at the table with it. She did not look at the note. She sat with the cup and looked at the garden through the window and then at her hands and then back at the garden.
The hour ended there.