For an entire year, I lent my neighbor money whenever she asked. Sometimes it was fifty dollars. Sometimes it was a hundred. She always promised to pay me back.
She never did. Not one single dollar.
At least, that’s what I thought.
The New Neighbor
My name is Joanne, but everybody calls me Jo. I’m fifty-eight, I spent thirty years as the front office secretary at Lincoln Elementary, and I live in the left half of a little yellow duplex on Birch Street. My husband, Ray, passed six years ago. My daughter, Kara, lives two towns over with her husband and my two grandsons, who are the light of my life and also the reason I own more plastic dinosaurs than any grown woman should.
For a long time, the right half of the duplex belonged to a young couple who played the drums. Badly. At midnight.
When they moved out, I’m not ashamed to say I baked myself a celebration cake.
Two weeks later, a small moving truck pulled up, and out climbed Edith.
Edith Lane was sixty-eight, thin as a rail, with short silver hair and a lavender cardigan that I would come to learn she wore nearly every single day. She had a voice like a radio announcer from the 1950s and a laugh that sounded like a teakettle coming to a boil.
The first thing she ever said to me, while carrying a box marked “KITCHEN STUFF (FRAGILE) (PROBABLY),” was: “You must be the neighbor. Please tell me you don’t play the drums.”
I liked her immediately.
Lemon Bars and Bad Jokes
We became friends fast, the way you sometimes do at our age, when you’ve stopped wasting time on people who don’t make you laugh.
The porch of our duplex is shared, one long wooden porch with a railing down the middle that neither of us ever paid attention to.
By the end of the first month, we’d dragged our rocking chairs to the same end and were having tea out there most evenings.
Edith made the best lemon bars I’ve ever eaten. I’m not exaggerating. Sharp and sweet, with a crumbly buttery crust and a little sprinkle of powdered sugar on top. She’d bring a plate out, set it on the little table between us, and say, “Now, I made these for myself, but I suppose you can have one. Or six.”
She also told the worst jokes in the history of the world. Truly terrible. She collected them like other people collect stamps.
“Jo,” she’d say, very seriously, “why don’t eggs tell jokes?”
“I don’t know, Edith.
Why don’t eggs tell jokes?”
“They’d crack each other up.”
And then she’d laugh that teakettle laugh, and I’d laugh too, not because the joke was good, but because she thought it was so good.
We did the crossword together every Sunday. She was better at it than me, which annoyed me to no end. She knew every river in Europe and every opera singer who ever lived. I knew all the TV show answers. Between the two of us, we hardly ever left a blank.
I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been since Ray passed until I wasn’t lonely anymore.
The First Knock
About two months after she moved in, Edith knocked on my door on a Tuesday afternoon. Not the porch, my actual front door, which she’d never done before.
She looked a little embarrassed.
She was holding her purse against her chest with both arms, like a shield.
“Jo,” she said, “I hate to ask. I really do. But my check’s late this month, and I’ve got a bill due tomorrow. Could you possibly lend me fifty dollars? I’ll pay you back the minute it comes in.”
“Of course,” I said, and I meant it. I grabbed my wallet and handed her two twenties and a ten. Fifty dollars wasn’t going to break me, and she was my friend.
She squeezed my hand. “You’re an angel. I’ll have it back to you by Friday.”
Friday came and went. So did the next Friday. I didn’t say anything. I figured it had slipped her mind, or her check was still late. It was only fifty dollars.
Then, three weeks later, another knock. Another apology.
This time it was a hundred dollars, for “an unexpected expense.” She didn’t say what. I didn’t ask.
“I’ll pay you back, Jo. Every penny. I promise.”
And I believed her.
The Ledger of Doom
I want to be honest with you here, because this story doesn’t make sense unless I am. I didn’t stay a perfect saint about it.
After the third or fourth time, I started keeping track.
I bought a little spiral notebook from the drugstore, the kind with a cheerful cartoon sunflower on the cover, and I started writing it all down. The date. The amount. What she said it was for, if she said. I kept it in the drawer by the stove, next to the takeout menus and the rubber bands.
My daughter, when she found it later, named it “The Ledger of Doom.” I told her that was very dramatic.
She told me I’d written “AGAIN??” next to one entry and underlined it three times, so who was really being dramatic here?
It went on like that for months. Fifty dollars in March. A hundred in April. Seventy-five in May, which was oddly specific. A hundred and fifty in June, for what she said was “the pharmacy.” Fifty dollars almost every couple of weeks through the summer.
Each time, she was so sorry. Each time, she promised. And each time, I said yes, because I didn’t know how to say no to someone who looked that worried.
But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t start to bother me.
Because here’s the thing that confused me. Edith never seemed to buy anything.
She didn’t go out to eat. She didn’t have new clothes. Same lavender cardigan, every day. Her car was older than my grandsons combined. Where was all that money going?
I tried, once, to ask gently. We were on the porch, and I said, “Edith, is everything all right? With money, I mean? You can tell me if you’re in some kind of trouble.”
She looked out at the street for a long moment. Then she smiled and patted my knee and said, “Jo, why did the scarecrow win an award?”
I sighed. “Why, Edith?”
“Because he was outstanding in his field.”
And that was that. Conversation over.
Kara Weighs In
My daughter Kara is a lot like her father. Practical. Direct. Allergic to nonsense. She’s an accountant, which I suppose was inevitable for a girl who used to organize her Halloween candy by color and calorie count.
She was visiting one Saturday in August, the boys running around the backyard chasing each other with water guns, when she went looking for a rubber band in the stove drawer and found the sunflower notebook.
She flipped through it. Her eyebrows went up. And up. And up, until I thought they might leave her face entirely.
“Mom,” she said slowly. “What is this?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s two thousand, six hundred dollars.” She flipped another page. “No, wait. Two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds like a lot.”
“It is a lot! Mom, has she paid any of this back?”
I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.
Kara sat down at the kitchen table across from me. She did the thing with her hands that her father used to do, pressing her fingertips together like she was about to give a presentation.
“Mom. I love you. You have the biggest heart of anyone I know. But I think this woman is taking advantage of you.”
“She’s my friend, Kara.”
“Friends pay friends back. Or at least they explain.” She tapped the notebook. “Has she ever told you what it’s for?”
“Bills. The pharmacy. Unexpected things.”
“That’s not an explanation. That’s a fortune cookie.” She shook her head. “You’re on a fixed income now. You can’t just keep handing out fifty-dollar bills every two weeks. What happens when your roof needs fixing? What happens when the car breaks down?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I knew she was right, at least about the math. Kara is always right about the math.
“Next time she asks,” Kara said, “you say no. Kindly. But you say no.”
“Fine,” I said.
She didn’t believe me.
Honestly, I didn’t believe me either.
The Time I Tried to Say No
Edith knocked on my door eleven days later.
I’d practiced. I really had. I’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said, “Edith, I care about you, but I can’t lend you any more money right now.” I’d said it out loud four times. I’d even said it to the cat, who looked deeply unimpressed.
I opened the door. There she was, purse clutched to her chest, lavender cardigan buttoned all the way up even though it was eighty-five degrees outside.
“Jo,” she said, “I’m so sorry to ask again…”
And I looked at her face. Really looked. For the first time, I noticed how thin she’d gotten since spring. How there were shadows under her eyes.
How her hands shook a little on the strap of the purse.
“How much, Edith?” I heard myself say.
So much for the mirror.
That night, I wrote “$100” in the notebook. Next to it, I didn’t write “AGAIN??” this time. I just wrote a small question mark. Because something was wrong, and I didn’t know what, and the not knowing was starting to bother me more than the money.
Little Mysteries
Around that time, odd little things started happening on my side of the duplex.
The first was my walkway. That October, I woke up early one morning to find that every single leaf had been raked off my front lawn and bagged neatly by the curb. I hadn’t done it. I’d been meaning to do it for two weeks, but my back had been giving me grief.
I asked the boy down the street, Tyler, if he’d done it.
He looked at me like I’d asked him if he’d flown to the moon. “Ms. Jo, it’s Saturday. I don’t wake up until noon on Saturday.”
The next week, it happened again.
Then my gutters, which had been hanging a little crooked for a year, were suddenly straight. Then the squeaky screen door stopped squeaking. Then, one morning after a hard frost, I found my tomato plants all covered with old bedsheets, tucked in like little ghosts.
I started to think I had a guardian angel. Or a very helpful raccoon.
One morning in early November, I couldn’t sleep. I got up around five-thirty to make coffee, and I looked out the front window.
And there was Edith. In my yard.
In the gray dawn, with mist curling along the ground and the porch lights still on, wearing a lavender knit hat and her long coat, slowly raking my leaves into a pile.
She moved so slowly. She stopped every few strokes to lean on the rake and catch her breath. But she kept going.
I almost went out there. I had my hand on the doorknob. But something stopped me. Maybe it was the way she looked around, making sure nobody was watching. She didn’t want to be seen. So I let her finish, and I went back to bed, and I lay there with my heart pounding, not knowing what to feel.
That afternoon on the porch, I said, “Edith, did you rake my lawn this morning?”
She sipped her tea.
“Jo, what do you call a fake noodle?”
“Edith.”
“An impasta.” She cackled. “Get it? Im-pasta.”
“I get it. Did you rake my lawn?”
She set down her mug and looked at me with those sharp, kind eyes. “Some things,” she said, “are better not asked about. Have another lemon bar.”
The Holidays
Edith spent Thanksgiving with us that year. Kara wasn’t thrilled, but I insisted. I wasn’t going to let anyone eat turkey alone in a duplex on Birch Street, not on my watch.
To Kara’s credit, she was perfectly polite. And to Edith’s credit, she won the boys over in about four minutes flat. She taught them a card game called “Spit” that involved a lot of slapping the table and yelling.
By the time the pie came out, my grandsons were calling her “Grandma Edie” and asking if she could come for Christmas too.
She did come for Christmas. She brought lemon bars, of course, and a small wrapped box for each of the boys. Inside were two old pocketknives, the folding kind with wooden handles, polished up and oiled.
“These were my brother’s,” she told them, very seriously. “He was a Boy Scout. He’d want somebody to use them. You only open them with your mom or your grandma watching, understand?”
The boys nodded like she’d handed them the crown jewels.
Later, when we were doing dishes, Kara leaned over and whispered, “Okay. I like her. I still think she owes you a lot of money. But I like her.”
“Told you,” I said.
The Last Few Months
That winter, Edith slowed down. A lot.
She stopped coming out on the porch as much. When she did, she’d wrap herself in a blanket even when the sun was out.
She said it was “just the cold getting into my bones.” She stopped making lemon bars. She stopped doing the crossword in pen and started doing it in pencil, which for Edith was a very serious sign.
She’d leave sometimes for whole days. A friend would pick her up in a little blue car early in the morning, and she wouldn’t come back until evening, looking so tired she could barely climb the porch steps. When I asked, she said she was “visiting a friend in the city.”
The money requests kept coming, though. Smaller now. Fifty here. Forty there. Once just twenty, for “the pharmacy again, Jo, I’m so sorry.”
By the end of the year, the Ledger of Doom said three thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars.
I added it up one night at the kitchen table, and I just stared at the number for a long time.
I wasn’t angry anymore, exactly. I was worried. And a little hurt that, after all this time, she still didn’t trust me enough to tell me what was going on.
The Morning She Was Gone
It was a gray Tuesday in early March. I woke up and something felt wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Then I realized. It was quiet. Too quiet. Every morning for a year, I’d heard Edith’s radio through the wall. She listened to the same old-time music station every single day while she made her oatmeal. Big band songs. Crooners. She’d sing along, badly, at the top of her lungs.
That morning, nothing.
I went out on the porch. Her rocking chair was gone.
Her little potted geranium was gone. Her welcome mat, the one that said “GO AWAY” as a joke, was gone.
I knocked on her door. Nothing. I knocked louder. Nothing. I walked around to the front window and peeked in.
The room was empty. Completely bare. Just clean carpet and pale walls and, in the far corner, one small forgotten potted plant sitting all alone on the floor.
She’d moved out. Overnight. Without a word.
I stood there on that porch for a long time. I think I was waiting for her to come around the corner with a plate of lemon bars and a terrible joke, and tell me it was all a big misunderstanding.
She didn’t.
I called the landlord.
He said she’d given notice a month earlier and asked him to keep it quiet. “She said she didn’t want a fuss,” he told me. “Paid up through the end of the month. Left the place spotless. Didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
No forwarding address. No phone number. No note. Nothing.
The Hurt
I’m not proud of the next few days.
I cried, mostly. I’d lost Ray, and I’d learned how to live with that. But this felt different. This felt like someone had looked at our whole friendship, the porch evenings and crosswords and Thanksgiving and Christmas, and decided it wasn’t worth a goodbye.
And then, as the hurt wore off a bit, the anger crept in. I took out the sunflower notebook and looked at that number. Three thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars. All those promises.
All those “I’ll pay you back, Jo, every penny.”
Kara came over that weekend. She found me at the kitchen table with the notebook open in front of me.
I expected her to say “I told you so.” She’d earned it, honestly. But she didn’t. She just sat down next to me, put her arm around my shoulders, and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I know you loved her.”
“I just don’t understand,” I said. “How could she just leave? After everything?”
“I don’t know,” Kara said. “Some people aren’t who we think they are.”
I nodded. But deep down, something about that didn’t sit right. I kept thinking about Edith in my front yard at dawn, leaning on that rake, catching her breath. Someone who was just using me wouldn’t do that. Would they?
The Envelope
Exactly one week after Edith disappeared, I walked out to the mailbox on a cold, bright morning. Bills. A grocery store flyer. A postcard from my dentist reminding me I was overdue for a cleaning, which I was choosing to ignore.
And underneath it all, a thick, cream-colored envelope. Heavy paper. The kind of envelope that means something official. It was from a law office in the city.
I stood there by the mailbox, my fingers going cold, and I thought: Oh no. She’s suing me. Or she’s in trouble. Or somebody’s coming after me for something to do with her.
I didn’t open it right away. I carried it into the kitchen like it might explode. I made a cup of tea. I sat down. I stared at it for a good ten minutes.
Then I opened it.
The first page was a typed letter on the law firm’s letterhead. It was short. I read it three times before the words made sense.
It said that my former neighbor, Edith Marie Lane, had passed away four days earlier at a hospice facility in the city, after a long illness.
Cancer. It said I’d been named in her will. And it asked me to call the office to schedule a time to come in.
Clipped to the back of that letter was a smaller envelope. Pale blue. My name written on the front in shaky, careful handwriting.
Jo.
That’s all it said.
I sat there with that little blue envelope in my hands, and I couldn’t breathe.
Her Letter
Inside the blue envelope were three pages of blue stationery, folded in thirds, and a tiny sprig of dried lavender that fell into my lap when I opened it. The handwriting started out neat and got shakier as it went, like she’d written it over several days.
I’m going to share some of it with you here, because I’ve read it so many times I know most of it by heart.
Dear Jo,
If you’re reading this, then I’ve gone and done the one thing I hate most, which is leave a party early. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about a lot of things, and I’m going to try to explain them all before my hand gives out, so bear with me if this gets messy.
First, the most important thing. I wasn’t lying to you about paying you back. I want you to know that. I never once took a dollar from you that I didn’t plan to return.
About a month before I moved in next door, my doctor told me I had cancer. The kind you don’t get better from. They gave me about a year, maybe a bit more if I was stubborn, and you know me, Jo. I’m very stubborn.
I moved to Birch Street because it was cheap, and quiet, and close enough to the hospital in the city. I didn’t plan on making friends. Honestly, I planned on keeping to myself until it was over. And then you opened your front door and I asked if you played the drums, and you laughed, and that was the end of my plan.
The money went to my medicine, mostly. And to food, the months when my pension ran out before the bills did. And to the gas for my friend Marion, who drove me to treatments in her little blue car when I told you I was “visiting a friend in the city.” I was visiting a friend, I suppose. Her name was chemotherapy, and she was terrible company.
I laughed out loud at that, through my tears. Even dying, she couldn’t resist a joke.
I know you probably wondered why I didn’t just tell you. Here’s the truth. When people find out you’re dying, they stop seeing you. They start seeing the sickness. They talk to you in soft voices. They stop telling you about their problems because yours are so much bigger. They stop laughing at your jokes, Jo. And my jokes are the best part of me.
With you, I got to just be Edith. The neighbor with the lemon bars and the bad jokes and the crossword in pen. You were the only person in my life who didn’t know, and that made you the only person who treated me like I was still alive. I couldn’t give that up. I’m sorry I was selfish about it.
The Rest of the Letter
Now. About the leaves.
Yes, it was me. And the gutters. And the screen door. And the bedsheets on your tomatoes. I couldn’t pay you back with money yet, so I paid you back the only way I could, a little at a time, at five in the morning when the pain kept me up anyway. I know you saw me that one morning in November. I saw the kitchen curtain move. Thank you for not coming out. I’d have had to tell you then, and I wasn’t ready.
When my pension money came in every month, I didn’t spend it all. I put a little bit away. Every single month, even the hard ones. And when my brother passed two years ago, he left me a small bit of money that I never touched. I wanted it all to go to someone who deserved it. That’s you, Jo.
I kept track too, you know. I had my own little notebook. I bet you had one. I bet it had flowers on it. You’re a flowers kind of person.
I gasped. I actually gasped out loud, alone in my kitchen.
My notebook says I owe you $3,850. My lawyer, Mr. Bennett, has instructions to give you more than that. Please don’t argue with him. He’s a very nice man, but he’s terrified of me, and I told him you’d try to give it back. The rest is interest. Interest on a year of tea, and porch evenings, and Thanksgiving with your family, and two little boys calling me Grandma Edie. Honestly, Jo, there’s not enough money in the world to pay that back. But I’m giving it my best shot.
I left without saying goodbye because I knew if I saw your face, I’d tell you everything, and then you’d spend my last few weeks crying in a hospice room instead of laughing on our porch. I’d rather you remember the porch. Please remember the porch.
One more thing. Please don’t be angry at yourself for wondering about me. You had every right to. You gave and gave and never knew why. Anybody would have wondered. But you kept giving anyway. That’s the part that matters. That’s the part I’ll take with me.
Thank you for being my friend at the very end of things. It was the best year I’d had in a long, long time.
All my love,
Edith
P.S. Why did the old lady leave her neighbor all her money? Because she was the only one who never asked for the punchline. Okay, that one’s not a real joke. I ran out of time to think of a good one. Have a lemon bar for me.
Mr. Bennett
I called the law office that afternoon. My voice was so wobbly, the receptionist had to ask me to repeat my name twice.
Two days later, I sat in a small office downtown, surrounded by bookshelves and old framed photos, across the desk from a kind-looking man with glasses and a sweater vest. Howard Bennett. He’d been Edith’s lawyer, he told me, and her brother’s before that.
“She talked about you, you know,” he said. “Every time she came in to update things. ‘Make sure Jo gets this. Make sure Jo gets that. Don’t let Jo argue.’” He smiled. “She was very specific about the arguing.”
He slid a folder across the desk.
Inside were the papers from her will. Edith had left me fifteen thousand dollars.
Fifteen thousand dollars. From a woman who wore the same cardigan every day and drove a car older than my grandsons.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “She owed me less than four thousand. I can’t take all of this.”
Mr. Bennett held up his hand, very gently. “Mrs. Mercer, with all due respect, I was given strict instructions. And I’ve known Edith Lane for twenty years. I am not going to be the one to cross her. Not even now.”
I laughed and cried at the same time, which was becoming a habit.
He also handed me a small cardboard box. Inside was a spiral notebook. On the cover was a cartoon daisy.
I opened it. Page after page of her shaky handwriting. Every loan, every date, every amount. Exactly like mine. And next to each entry, in a different pen, she’d written little notes. “Raked leaves. Partial payment.” “Fixed gutter. Partial payment.” “Covered tomatoes. Frost tonight. Can’t let Jo lose her tomatoes.”
Next to the very last entry, the twenty dollars for “the pharmacy again,” she’d written: “Paid in full. With love.”
Telling Kara
I drove straight to Kara’s house from the lawyer’s office. I didn’t call first. I just showed up on her doorstep with Edith’s letter in one hand and the daisy notebook in the other.
She read the letter at her kitchen table while the boys watched cartoons in the next room. I watched her face. Kara doesn’t cry easily. She didn’t cry at her own wedding. She didn’t cry when the boys were born, she just kept saying “Look at his little fingers” over and over, like she was checking the math on them.
By the second page of Edith’s letter, my practical, sensible, allergic-to-nonsense daughter was sobbing.
“Mom,” she said, when she finally put it down. “I said such awful things about her.”
“You were looking out for me,” I said. “She knew that.
She’d have liked you for it.”
“I told you she was taking advantage of you.”
“Honey, I thought so too, sometimes. That’s the point. She said so herself. Anybody would have wondered.”
Kara wiped her eyes and picked up the daisy notebook. She flipped through the pages, reading all of Edith’s little notes. Raked leaves. Fixed gutter. Covered tomatoes.
“She was paying you back the whole time,” she whispered. “We just weren’t counting it.”
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. She was paying me back the whole time. I just didn’t know what to look for.
What I Did With the Money
For a few weeks, I didn’t touch it. It felt wrong, somehow. Like spending it would mean she was really gone.
Then one night, I sat on the porch, alone, with a cup of tea and a plate of lemon bars I’d made from a recipe I found taped inside the daisy notebook.
(They weren’t as good as hers. They’ll never be as good as hers. But they were close.) And I thought about what Edith would have wanted.
She’d been hungry, some months. She’d told me so in that letter. Hungry and too proud to say it, right next door to me, while I was making casseroles for one and freezing the leftovers.
How many other Ediths were out there? On my street? In my town?
So I did three things.
First, I paid off the little bit left on my car loan and fixed my roof, because Kara was right about the math, and Edith would have wanted me to be sensible.
Second, I hired a nice young man with a pickup truck to build a little wooden pantry box on a post at the end of my front walk. It has a slanted roof and a door that latches.
I keep it stocked with canned soup, pasta, cereal, peanut butter, and whatever else people need. Anybody can take what they need. No questions asked, no notebook, no promises to pay anything back.
The neighborhood kids call it “Edith’s Pantry.” I didn’t name it that. Tyler, the boy down the street who sleeps until noon on Saturdays, painted the name on the side in purple letters. When I asked him why purple, he shrugged and said, “She always wore that purple sweater. Seemed right.”
I had to go inside for a few minutes after that.
Third, I took the boys to the hardware store, and we bought every lavender plant they had.
The Lavender
We planted them in the spring, all along the front steps of the duplex. Both sides. Mine and hers.
A young couple lives in Edith’s half now.
They have a baby girl and, thank goodness, no drum set. The first week they moved in, I brought them a plate of lemon bars and told them a joke.
“Why don’t eggs tell jokes?” I asked.
They looked at each other. “Why?”
“They’d crack each other up.”
They laughed, politely, the way you laugh at a strange older neighbor you’ve just met. But they took the lemon bars. And the next week, the young mother knocked on my door and asked if I knew any more jokes, because her husband had been telling the egg one to everyone at work.
I knew a whole notebook’s worth. Edith left those to me too.
What Edith Taught Me
I think about Edith every single day. When I do the crossword, I use a pen now. When I hear big band music on the radio, I sing along, badly, at the top of my lungs.
When I see someone at the grocery store counting out coins at the register, a little embarrassed, I find a way to help without making a fuss.
Here’s what she taught me.
Kindness is never wasted. Not one bit of it. Even when you can’t see where it’s going. Even when you’re keeping a grumpy little notebook with “AGAIN??” underlined three times. It all goes somewhere.
And people are carrying things we can’t see. The neighbor who always seems to need something. The coworker who never joins in. The friend who cracks a joke every time you try to ask something serious. Sometimes, there’s a whole story behind that door, and they’re just trying to protect the one small piece of their life that still feels normal.
It’s okay to wonder. It’s okay to set limits, too.
Kara was right about that, and I’ve gotten better at it since. But before you decide someone is taking advantage of you, it’s worth asking one more time, gently. And if they still won’t tell you, it’s worth remembering that you might not have the whole story.
I still have both notebooks. The sunflower and the daisy. They sit together in the drawer by the stove, next to the takeout menus and the rubber bands.
Mine says Edith owed me $3,850.
Hers says she paid me back in full.
We were both right. But she was a little more right than me.
She usually was. Especially at crosswords.
Thank you so much for reading Jo and Edith’s story. We hope it made you smile and maybe call a neighbor! This is a fictional story shared for entertainment only, and any resemblance to real people is coincidental. If you or someone you love is facing a serious illness, please reach out to your doctor and the people who care about you.
