Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page A

I even come in?”
    I stepped back away from the door and she did.
    She cut a straight path to the opposite wall, where the pictures of Lorrie loomed like a shrine. I think I’d been adding nearly one a day, purposely not counting the balance of Myra’s new additions as I wore the pile down.
    “Wow,” she said. “That’s weird. She doesn’t look at all like I expected. I thought I knew just what she would look like. I guess I thought she’d look familiar. Not like a stranger, you know?”
    I wanted to say, “Now you know how I felt when I first saw you.”
    I didn’t.
    She went on. “Lorrie, right? My mom told me her name was Lorrie. That’s an OK name. I hate my name. It’s weird.”
    “You know what Vida means, don’t you?”
    “Of course I do,” she said.
    “Then I would think you would like it.”
    “Know why she gave me that name? Cause I tried to die the first night I was born. From all my heart stuff. She was trying to make sure I never pulled anything like that again.”
    Transplant statistics rattled around in my brain. How many patients, by ratio, would still be alive in five years. How many in ten. Quite possibly I was remembering the numbers all wrong. But the message in my brain felt clear.
    “Tell me something about her,” she said.
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t care. Anything.”
    “That doesn’t help me narrow it down much. She was a whole person. A fairly complex person, at that. There were a lot of ‘things’ about her, and I have no idea how to separate out which one you want to hear.”
    “What was her favorite color?”
    I paused briefly in that odd moment. Felt it. Which was odd in itself. Just to feel a moment, right there in the moment.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    Her mouth fell open. Almost laughably so.
    “How can you not know your own wife’s favorite color?”
    “It’s just not the sort of question I would ask her. This is not high school, Vida. That’s more like a teenager’s dating question. It’s like asking someone, ‘What’s your sign?’ It’s not an important detail about someone. It’s not significant.”
    We stood awkwardly for a moment. I was becoming more aware of the fact that we were both still standing, and had been for a long time. It was growing more awkward by the moment, but I didn’t want to ask her to sit. I didn’t want to issue any invitations.
    She pulled her coat more tightly around herself, which I took as a sign — the only sign she betrayed — that I had hurt her slightly. Or maybe more than slightly.
    “But you know her sign,” she said. “Right?”
    “Yes. I know Lorrie was an Aries.”
    “Well, good. Then you’re not totally hopeless.”
    She began to wander around my living room, looking a bit aimless. Gazing up at each wall and window treatment. Running her hand over the back of the couch and the two big recliners.
    “Did she decorate this place?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then her favorite color was green.”
    I looked around at my own living room as if for the first time. The rugs and the furniture all carried a color theme of deep hunter green. It seemed absurd that someone from outside the house, outside the marriage, needed to point that out to me.
    I didn’t answer. All answers felt like snares.
    “That’s weird,” Vida said. “Green. I wouldn’t have thought green. I would’ve guessed blue. My favorite color is blue.”
    “Not surprising,” I said.
    “Meaning what?”
    But I just shook my head. Never answered.
    I knew what I meant, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Couldn’t put it into words. There’s a big grouping of people who like blue, and they have something in common, but I couldn’t get a verbal bead on what that was.
    “OK,” Vida said. “So colors aren’t important to you. They’re not significant. Fine. Tell me something about her that’s significant. Just one thing. Tell me the one thing about her that you think is the very most important thing.”
    I didn’t even have to take