I woke at 12:15am.
Hm, that’s not quite accurate.
At 12:15am I rolled over in bed, having laid awake since we went to bed. I looked over at the glowing red digits on the alarm clock. It was time. I got out of bed, walked over to my suitcase against the wall, unzipped a side pocket and pulled out a piece of stiff paper that was hidden there.
The hotel room was dark, but the hotel room was small. So it was not hard to find my way to Trudy’s side of the bed. Once there, I set the paper on her side table and made some shuffling noises with the paper and her phone and the charging cord.
“Oh look,” I said. “Look what I found!”
She woke up with a start.
“What!?”
“Look what I found on the table.”
I turned on the lamp and handed her the stiff piece of paper. It was black with blue paper pasted to the foreground. On the top against the black there was a large, script T drawn in white pastel crayon. And there were two flower-buttons punched thru the paper to either side of the letter. Against the blue paper, it said happy birthday, i love you.
Trudy took the card and held it an inch in front of her face so that she could read it without her glasses. I leaned over and hugged her.
“Happy birthday to Trudy.”
We turned out the lights and went back to sleep. The race, after all, wasn’t for another eight hours.