His Letters Reached Me Fourteen Years Late, and the First Said Goodbye novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Flap

At her mother's kitchen table Odalys reads the first letter, fans the envelopes by date, finds Aunt Verna's pencil on every flap, and gets a honey-sweet call from Verna asking her to bring the box to church so it can be burned.

My mother's kitchen was half in boxes.

The table was clear except for one mug and the shoebox.

Alister sat in the chair by the window where he used to sit at twenty, with his hands flat on the wood.

He did not look at the letters.

He looked at the glass, where the porch light made a yellow square.

I unfolded the first sheet again and read the whole of it, standing at the counter.

You were right to go.

I am not going to wait for you, so do not carry me with you.

I stood behind the Methodist church this morning where the bus stops.

I watched you get on.

You did not look back. I am glad.

I want you to have Chicago, or Columbus, or wherever you land.

I will be on roofs. I will be fine.

If you ever write to me, write because you want to, and not because you feel you owe me. I could not stand that.

Alister

I read it to the end and put it down.

"You watched me leave," I said.

"I stood behind the church."

"Why didn't you say so?" I asked.

"Because you'd have gotten off the bus."

He said it plainly.

My eyes stung, and I turned to the sink and ran the tap for no reason.

When I could look at him again, I took the other eight envelopes out and laid them in a row across the table.

Each had a date inside, in the top corner of the page, and I put them in order.

The first was the October I left.

The second was the October after.

The third was the one after that.

Then nothing for six years.

Then six Octobers in a row, one a year, until last year.

I touched the gap between the third letter and the fourth.

"You stopped," I said.

"I did."

"For six years," I said.

"Yes."

I did not ask why. I thought I knew.

A man writes three letters into a mailbox that never answers, and then he gets some sense.

I was glad for him, and I was sorry, and I could not have said which was bigger.

Then I picked up the flap of the third envelope to tuck the letter back, and I stopped.

There was writing on the inside of it, small and neat, in pencil.

rec'd 10/4 V.B.

I turned over the next one.

rec'd 10/4 V.B.

The next one said it too.

I went down the row.

Nine envelopes and nine flaps.

Nine times, in the same upright hand, the same date and the same two initials.

Aunt Verna had been a bookkeeper at the county for thirty years and the treasurer of her church for thirty years.

She had never in her life thrown away a receipt.

My hand shook so that the paper rattled, and I could not make it stop.

Alister got up.

He came around the table without hurrying.

He put his thumb on the pencil mark on the flap I was holding, over the initials, and kept it there.

His thumb covered the V and the B together.

It was warm, and rough from work, and it pressed the paper flat against my fingers until they stopped moving.

Neither of us said anything.

"She picked up your mother's mail," he said at last.

"After the stroke. Before that too, as a favor."

"I thought your mother passed them to you, and you chose not to answer."

"Everyone knew," I said. "That you put them in the box."

"Everyone on Fairview. For fourteen years." He did not take his hand off.

"I never wondered how your aunt could stand to look at me at the church picnics."

"She stood it very well," I said.

"Yes."

I looked at his thumb, and then I looked up, and he was already looking at me.

His eyes were gray, with a thin dark ring around them.

I remembered that from a summer I had spent fourteen years not thinking about.

The wall phone rang.

It was my mother's phone, with a cord, the one nobody had called in two weeks except people who wanted to say they were sorry.

Alister took his hand away.

I picked it up.

"Odalys, honey?"

It was Aunt Verna, and her voice was soft and warm.

"The woman who bought my house just rang me," she said.

"She was so worried she'd done wrong. She said she gave you a box of old mail."

"She did," I said.

"Honey, bring it to church tomorrow. Some of that mail is private."

She breathed in.

"It has been in my care a long time."

"I'd like to be with you when you look at it. And I'll see it burned properly after."

I looked at the row on my mother's table.

I looked at the pencil.

"I'll bring it, Aunt Verna," I said.

"There's my girl."

I hung up and stood with my hand on the phone.

"She just told me she'll burn it," I said.

"I heard her."

"She said it was in her care."

Alister had gone very still by the window.

I picked up the first envelope and turned the flap toward the light, and I did not tell him I was not going to church.

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