Unable to visit—we live on opposite coasts—I sit before my computer. There, Kay is next to her husband Walt, whom I’ve never met. She appears unchanged, her long hair not yet gray, her oval face only slightly more taut than I recall. But her expression is grim and distant. Since the diagnosis, her decline has been swift. Memory care looms. I want to reach out and close the distance between us. The screen is not the only barrier.

Walt greets me as if this is an ordinary day, while adjusting Kay’s pillows for her comfort. Responding to his cheerfulness with fond recollections, I tell him that in high school, Kay and I transferred together to the same school but then I went back. Better at integrating, she stayed. After I moved east, we talked rarely but when we did, her warmth was always there. When Covid was at its worst in New York, she called to see how I was holding up.

Kay is even unaware of the screen. She wants to turn away or go to sleep. I watch as Walt puts his arm around her shoulders and gently nudges her in my direction. An idea comes to me. Telling Walt I’ll be right back, I return with a letter I just found in a drawer. On stationery bordered with flowers, Kay was writing to me in the summer after we graduated from high school. “I forgot we were in touch then,” I tell Walt, adjusting my monitor as I start to read.

Reminding me I was in Switzerland, Kay calls me a “jet-set girl” and says I must be “having a blast.” She reports that her family’s driveway looks like a “junkyard” after her parents bought a new car, which turned out to be her “uncle’s old ’68 LTD Ford.” On a visit to Waikiki, her grandparents set her up with a twenty-eight-year-old accountant from Tennessee. He lived in a “swanky” apartment. He was cute but businesslike. “It was horrible,” she wrote. Walt and I laugh together. Kay begins to smile, looking almost like herself.

“She remembers it,” I say. Watching her, Walt says, “I’m not sure.” Then quieter: “read more.”

In the letter, Kay describes the classes in Classical Greek and archaeology she would be taking in college. She asks for my college address. At the end, she wrote, “Have fun, do all you can, I miss you.”

Walt is gazing away from the screen. “I miss you too,” I say.

Lisa N. Peters grew up in Portland, Oregon, and lives in New York City. An art historian, she has published extensively on US art, from the colonial era to the present (Lnpeters.com), including her forthcoming book, Reframing Allegory in Work by American Women Painters of the Gilded Age—Six Case Studies (Routledge, 2027). She is currently writing flash and ekphrastic fiction along with a historical novel.