The Last Row

Sue Ellen had been a treasurer for thirty-one years. Not for a bank or a corporation, but for the Carenage Community Aid Network, a small NGO that patched roofs for the elderly and ran a weekend food pantry out of a converted garage. She was good at it. Meticulous. The kind of woman who could spot a transposed digit from across the room and who kept spreadsheets the way other people kept journals.

Life, for Sue Ellen, was a thing to be managed. Balanced. Reconciled.

She lived alone in a brick ranch house on Maple Avenue, the same one she and her late husband, Frank, had bought in 1989. The garden was neat. The pantry was organized by expiration date. Her body, however, had been running on autopilot for so long that she had stopped noticing the little red flags: the way her knees ached after climbing the courthouse steps, the shortness of breath when she carried grocery bags, the thickening around her middle that she politely referred to as "middle-aged spread."

She was fifty-six.

The first obituary landed like a paper cut that was small, irritating, yet easy to ignore. Bethany Holcomb. Brain aneurysm. Fifty-three. Sue Ellen hadn't spoken to Bethany since upper six at Holy Name Convent, when they had competed for class secretary. She felt a distant sadness, signed the online guestbook, and went back to reconciling the pantry's quarterly expenses.

The second one hurt more. David Markan. Heart attack while shoveling snow out in Boston. Fifty-four. David had sat behind her in Mr. Donnelly's JAVA classes, always passing her notes folded into tight little triangles. She had cried for exactly seven minutes in her kitchen, then made herself a cup of tea.

The third was a wrecking ball.

Patricia “Peggy” Dunleavy. Colon cancer. Fifty-two.

Peggy had been Sue Ellen's best friend since Girls Guides. They had traded hair ribbons, boy troubles, and later, casseroles when Frank got sick. Peggy was the one who still called her on her birthday. Who sent a stupid cat meme every Tuesday without fail. Who had, just last month, said over the phone: "Sue, you sound winded just walking to the mailbox. Are you okay?"

Sue Ellen had laughed it off.

Now Peggy was gone. And at the funeral, a gray, drizzling Tuesday at Fatima Church in St. Anns, Sue Ellen looked around the pews and did the math.

Row after row of former Convent classmates. And so many empty spaces.

She sat next to Marcy Leotaud, who had been the fastest girl on the track team. Marcy now used a walker. Across the aisle, Tommy Reardon, the star footballer, was taking three different pills from a rainbow-colored weekly organizer. And behind her, whispering during the final prayer, two women she didn't recognize were talking about their own recent scans, their own narrowing futures.

On the drive home, Sue Ellen pulled into the Ellerslie Park parking lot and just sat there, engine idling, hands on the wheel.

Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.

They were dropping. Not from accidents or bad luck. From bodies that had been ignored for too long. She thought about her own file drawer of excuses: I don't have time. I don't know where to start. I'm not a gym person. I'll do it tomorrow.

Tomorrow had run out for Peggy.

That night, she did not open her laptop to work on the grant report. She did not eat the frozen lasagna she had planned. Instead, she laced up an ancient pair of sneakers, dusty from years in the mudroom, and walked to the end of her driveway.

Then to the corner.

Then, huffing and red-faced, around the entire block.

It took twelve minutes. Her calves screamed. Her lungs burned. She looked ridiculous, a fifty-six-year-old treasurer in sensible slacks and a windbreaker, shuffling past Mrs. Obermeyer's prize roses.

But she did it again the next night. And the next.

The following week, she replaced her morning orange juice with water. She didn't announce it. Didn't post about it. Didn't make a vision board. She just did it.

Within a month, she could walk two blocks without stopping. Within two, she bought an actual pair of walking shoes, not from a fancy store, but from the Sports Gear Store in Westmall, and only after finding them on clearance. She started carrying a small spiral notebook in her purse. Not for expenses. For habits. Walked: yes. Water: yes. Ate vegetables before carbs: yes.

She felt foolish writing it down. But she also felt something she hadn't felt in years: capable.

Six months later, she attended the class of '86 memorial mass, a new tradition she bitterly resented. Four more names had been added. Charles Roopan. Linda Hanratty. Two others she barely knew from the neighbourhood.

But this time, when Marcy asked her to help carry a flower arrangement to the altar, Sue Ellen didn't hesitate. She bent her knees. She lifted cleanly. She walked up the marble steps without pausing for breath.

"You look different," Marcy whispered.

"I am different," Sue Ellen whispered back. And for once, she wasn't talking about her balance sheet.

That night, she sat on her front porch with a cup of herbal tea, the summer crickets humming. She thought about the obituaries. About Peggy's voice on the phone: "Are you okay?"

She wasn't okay back then. But she was getting there. Not because she had become a master of fitness. She still hated push-ups. She still didn't know what a macronutrient was. She had never set foot in a gym and probably never would.

But she had learned something the dead couldn't teach her, only the living could: You don't need to be a master before you start. You just need to start before you run out of time.

And so, in a quiet house on Maple Avenue, the treasurer of the Carenage Community Aid Network closed her notebook, the one with the tiny checkmarks, row after row after row, and smiled.

She was still here. And tomorrow, she would walk again.