Ang Notebook na Mangga

My wife wrote the grocery list every Sunday for eleven years, and I did the buying, and this division of labor was so total that at her funeral, between the second and third eulogies, I caught myself worrying that nobody had told me what to get.

This notebook was her list notebook. Sixty pages, spiral, a mango on the cover for no reason either of us could ever establish. She was four pages from the end. I am not a writer — I sell insurance, which is a way of writing about the future without adjectives — but the Sunday after we buried her, I sat at the kitchen table at her time, 6:30, with her pen, because the alternative was sitting there with nothing.

FIRST LIST (mine). Rice. Eggs. The coffee she buys. The soap she buys. Whatever else she buys. — I stood in Save More for one hour and eleven minutes with that list, men of my age orbiting me with their own small papers, and I understood for the first time that the store is full of us, the entrusted, pushing carts through aisles our wives have alphabetized in some other notebook we never asked to see.

Aling Susan at the vegetable stall asked after the boy. I said he was staying with his lola until I "got organized." She looked at my list, all five lines of it, and added kalabasa, sitaw, and okra with the pen from behind her ear. "Tinola on Wednesday," she said. "Sinigang Saturday. He eats squash if you don't announce it." My wife, it turns out, had briefed the market. I bought everything. Wednesday, there was tinola. He ate the squash. I did not announce it.

SECOND LIST. Everything from the first list, plus: the red coffee, NOT the gold (correction issued from beyond, via Aling Susan, who watched me reach for the gold with the expression of a woman watching a man disgrace a memory).

The boy came home the third week. He inspected the refrigerator like an auditor, opened the freezer, and stood there in the cold light for a while. "Mama buys ube," he said. Present tense. I have thought about that present tense every day since. "Then it goes on the list," I said, and he went and got the notebook himself, and that is how the list became a thing written by committee.

THIRD LIST, fourth line, in pencil, in a seven-year-old's architecture: OOBEY ICE CREAM. I have preserved the spelling in every list since, the way the government preserves the misprints on old money. It is worth more that way.

People at the office ask how I am managing, in the voice people use for that question, and I never know how to explain that the honest answer is a grocery list. That she is still telling me what to get — through a market vendor, through a boy's freezer memory, through eleven years of red-not-gold — and that every Sunday at 6:30 I sit down with her notebook and take the dictation.

Four pages from the end, I said. I have decided what happens when the mango notebook runs out: nothing. It does not run out. Lists continue on other paper; that is the whole secret of lists. You keep buying the rice. You keep the rules past the reasons. And on Sundays, if your handwriting happens to drift a little toward hers — the market is open early, and nobody there will mention it.