I called Woodland Terrace and Rosa answered the phone. I said, “This is David Gagne,” and she asked, “How are you doing?”
I ignored her question and told her that I wanted to know what I needed to do to have my dad retrieve my mom’s personal belongings. She told me that they had collected everything she had and were keeping it “in a safe place”, and that my dad could ask for Heather, the head of housekeeping, when he arrived.
I told Rosa that we were sitting in the parking lot, which seemed to surprise her. She said that she would page Heather to get mom’s stuff and she’d bring it to the front desk.
My dad went into the building and I sat in the car and waited. After fifteen minutes my dad came out to the car with an arrangement of flowers and told me to pull around to the front of the building. I did that while my dad walked over there to meet two women carrying boxes. They put the boxes in the trunk while I sat in the front seat staring out the window. I heard one of them say, “This one’s pretty big,” but that was all. My dad got in the car and we left.
The flowers had a 3″x4″ envelope and inside, addressed to me, was a folded piece of paper. Printed on an old dot-matrix line-printer, it read:
WITH DEEPEST SYMPATHY FROM WOODLAND TERRACE