josée
Mme Desrochers is moving on July 1st, to a résidence in Rosemont with a dining room and a nurse on every floor. Her niece Josée came today to start packing. Fifty years of things, so they're starting early. I carried boxes down to her car for an hour: lamps, records, eleven tins of tea.
On a break on the front steps I told Josée what her aunt said in February. The voices upstairs, M. Albert.
Josée laughed, not in a mean way. Her aunt hasn't heard anything without her hearing aids since about 2012, she said, and she takes them out at seven every night and watches the news with subtitles.
And Albert was her husband. Mon oncle Albert. They lived upstairs, in my flat, from 1968 until his knees went, and then they swapped with the people on the ground floor. He died in 2001.
"So yes," Josée said. "He talked upstairs. A long time ago."
Then she asked if I wanted a lamp, and I took a lamp.
It's green.