Dear Mathilde

At dusk on the last day of second grade, we stopped doing wheelies in the empty lot down the street to watch Mathilde, rigid on the sidewalk as her mother shoved a suitcase into the trunk of someone’s car. Her mother never turned around. Never waved goodbye. Perhaps it was her father who peeled away in his Chevrolet, flicking a cigarette butt out the window and not looking back, but ever since, Mathilde’s numbed us with tales of an emerald world where all beings are paired — first, clowns and ducklings, princesses and curmudgeons. Later, men in suits and secretaries.

We’re not fonda melodrama, Mattie.

We scoff and roll our eyes as she ties imaginary knots in the air. Mathilde’s driven by an insatiable itch to matchmake us with all the wrong people, even though we always say no, even when her own ragged life is less than muscular. She’d marry us off to our brothers if she could. Mathilde won’t learn from the past, won’t step back, pause, pause again, consider sizes and shapes, align corners and edges first. Given a puzzle, the blur of the middle is where she’ll begin. We joke over prawns on toast that she’d use toenail clippers to snip and trim impediments to her bigger picture.

“I create couples. That’s what I do,” Mathilde gushes to any unpartnered person within range. “It’s in my DNA, my bones, every fiber of my being.” She waves and warbles whenever she spots us.  We duck around corners and take cover, but she sniffs us out, hand-delivers cursive invitations to blind dates on handmade paper, presses scented possibilities into our hands.

Go away, Mattie. Give up.

We are not without feeling. We send a group card when we hear cancer’s unforgiving greed has taken over her DNA, her bones, the very fibers of her being. We suppose over martinis it is her body’s response to a life of fruitless enterprise, of matchmaking disappointments. Where a vacuum exists, something must grow, we say, sucking pimentos from our olives, raising our glasses to her good health.

Sorry, Mattie.

We don’t do well with failure. We don’t visit as her body betrays her. But we send daisies for cheer. Weeks later, we hear from a friend of a friend that when her last breaths could no longer be heard in the hush of her hospice room, Mattie’s neighbor, at her side throughout, and her favorite nurse leaned into each other and sobbed. They wrapped their arms around each other’s waists and stumbled like conjoined twins out of the room.

They say hearing is the last sense to leave when someone dies. Mattie’s spirit must have soared to a honeyed victory when she overheard the two making plans for the weekend.

We raise our glasses again.

Well done, Mathilde. Way to go.