"I'll drive," Lena said.
Evelyn looked at the keys in her hand. Then she looked at Lena, who was already standing up with her coat half on.
"That's probably wise," Evelyn said, and put the keys back on the hook.
They took Route 33 north toward Columbus in Lena's Buick with the wipers going and the defroster roaring. Evelyn sat in the passenger seat with the card in her lap, wrapped in a clean dish towel, the way she used to wrap registered mail.
The young woman at the hospice had called back with an address. She'd called Miriam first, she said, and Miriam had gone quiet and then said yes, come.
The house was a small brick ranch in Westerville with a moving truck backed into the driveway and every light on. Boxes were stacked on the porch under the snow.
The woman who opened the door was about sixty-six, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain. She looked at Lena for a long time before she said anything.
"You have his eyes," she said. "I'm Miriam."
They sat at a kitchen table with nothing on it but three mugs of tea, because the rest of the kitchen was already in boxes.
"He was on my floor for six weeks," Miriam said. "Room twelve. He was funny. Most of them aren't, by then. He used to do the crossword in pen to show off."
Lena laughed, and then she didn't.
"He talked about you," Miriam said. "Every day. His little sister who could out-work any man in Calder County. He told me about your mom's farm, and the fight. He said he was the one who was wrong, and he'd been too proud to say it."
"I was wrong too," Lena said.
"He said you'd say that." Miriam smiled a little. "He wrote that card the week before Thanksgiving. He gave it to me with a stamp already on it. He said he was going to call you first, when he got his nerve up. And if he hadn't called you by the twentieth, I was to mail it so you'd have it by Christmas."
"He died on the second," Lena said.
"He did. Very quick, at the end." Miriam turned her mug around in her hands. "And I'm so sorry, Lena. In all of that, the card got put in a folder with his paperwork. I didn't find it until last month. I was cleaning out thirty-one years of desk drawers, and there it was, with his handwriting on it."
"How did you find me?"
"His obituary said his sister Lena, of Pine Hollow. The phone book had you on Main Street." Miriam shrugged. "I crossed out the old address and put on a new stamp, because I figured the old one wouldn't be enough anymore. I put it in the blue box at the end of my street. I didn't put my name on it."
She looked down. "I didn't know if you'd want to hear from the woman who kept your brother's card for twenty-two years."
Evelyn spoke for the first time since they'd sat down.
"You kept it safe," she said. "That's not the same as keeping it."
Miriam looked at her. Then she nodded, slowly, and took off her glasses and wiped them on her sweater.
Lena opened the card at Miriam's kitchen table.
It was a picture of a red cardinal on a snowy branch. Inside, under the printed Merry Christmas, Paul had written in blue ballpoint, in his slanting hand with the looping L.
Lena,
You were right about Mom's farm. I was wrong. I'm sorry it took me three years and a cancer to say so.
Save me a seat at Dot's.
Merry Christmas. Your brother, Paul
Lena read it twice. Then she held it against her chest with both hands and sat that way, with her eyes shut, for a long time.
Miriam reached across the table and put her hand on Lena's arm. Evelyn looked out the window at the snow falling on the moving truck.
They drove home after nine, slow, behind a salt truck most of the way.
"You knew it would be a woman," Lena said somewhere around Lancaster. "From the handwriting."
"I knew it would be somebody kind," Evelyn said. "You don't carry a dead man's Christmas card for twenty-two years unless you are."
Before they left, Miriam had promised to come up to Pine Hollow when she was back in Ohio to visit her daughter in the spring. Lena had made her write the date on the calendar in pencil, in her small neat rounded hand.
On Christmas Eve morning, Lena Ward walked into Dot's Corner Diner and sat down at the counter.
Evelyn was already there, two stools down, with a cup of tea and a crossword puzzle. Lena took off her coat. Instead of hanging it on the hook by the door, she folded it and laid it across the empty stool beside her.
Dot came down the counter with the coffee pot. She looked at the coat on the stool.
"You waiting on somebody, hon?"
"My brother," Lena said.
Dot didn't ask. She'd been running that diner since 1978, and she knew a thing or two about empty stools. She set down a second cup in front of the coat and filled it to the top.
Lena took the card out of her purse and stood it up against the sugar jar, the red cardinal facing the empty seat, and the steam rose off both cups in the morning light.