His Letters Reached Me Fourteen Years Late, and the First Said Goodbye novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Casserole

Verna arrives with a casserole, lies, is shown her own handwriting, and says it plain: someone had to stay. At midnight at the old mailbox Odalys and Alister nearly kiss, and he sets a rule she mocks.

Aunt Verna's Buick pulled into the drive at a quarter to one on Sunday, with a casserole dish riding on the passenger seat.

I watched her from the front window.

She got out in her good navy coat with the cardinal brooch on the collar.

She came up the walk holding the dish in both hands.

I had put the shoebox in my mother's bedroom, under the folded quilts.

I opened the door before she knocked.

"You weren't at the ten-thirty, honey," she said. "I saved your mother's pew."

"I wasn't up to it."

"Of course you weren't."

She came in past me and set the dish on the kitchen counter.

"Green beans and the crispy onions. You need to eat something that's not a sandwich."

She looked at the bare table, and her mouth went small.

"You haven't got the box out. Where is it?"

"Aunt Verna, how long did you have those letters?"

She turned all the way around.

"What letters, honey?"

I took one envelope out of my cardigan pocket and held it up with the flap open.

I had carried it all morning.

"This one," I said. "Rec'd ten-four, V.B."

She did not come closer.

"I've never seen that."

"It's your handwriting," I said.

"Anybody could write initials."

"Anybody whose name starts with V and B?"

"The mail carrier marks things, honey," she said, and she smiled.

I had spent nine years in courtrooms typing other people's lies word for word.

I knew how a lie sounded when it was being careful.

"Sit down, Aunt Verna," I said.

She did not sit. She put her purse on the counter very precisely and folded both hands over its clasp.

"I kept the post for your mother," she said. "That is all."

"She couldn't hold a letter after the stroke. I opened what had to be opened."

"You opened nine envelopes with my name on them."

"I read them to see they weren't anything that would upset her," she said.

"They weren't addressed to her."

Aunt Verna looked at me for a long moment.

Then her face changed, and I saw the one under the soft one, and it was not ashamed.

"Someone had to stay," she said.

"What?"

"You got to go. You went to Chicago and got a career and a nice little apartment."

Her voice stayed low and even.

"I got your mother. Do you know what that was? Six years of a woman who didn't know Tuesday from Friday."

"I changed her sheets. I cut her food. I sat in a hospital chair all last winter while you sent flowers."

I stared at her.

"I called every Sunday."

"You called," she said.

"You never told me she was that bad," I said.

"You never asked me a question that wasn't about her pills."

She unfolded her hands.

"And every October that McCreary boy put his little note in the box, and I thought: if she reads one, she'll come home."

"She'll want the house. She'll want to move her mother up to Chicago to die in a strange bed," she said.

"And I will be left in this street with nobody."

"Left again," I said, because I wanted to hear her say it.

"By everyone who mattered. Your father, then your mother, and then you."

She lifted her chin.

"I was not going to be left by the last one. So I kept the post. I'm not sorry."

I had nothing in my hands but the envelope, and I held it.

"You read them," I said. "All nine."

"I keep records. I'm an Eckert," she said.

"Take your casserole, please."

"Odalys."

"Take it," I said.

She picked the dish up. Her hands were steady, and her brooch caught the light.

"This street thinks what I've told it for fourteen years," she said, at the door.

"You've been gone. I've been here. Remember that when you tell it your story."

She went down the walk. She drove away at exactly the speed limit.

I did not eat anything that day.

At midnight I could not stay in the house.

I went out to the end of the walk in my mother's old coat.

I stood next to the dented mailbox, under the street lamp.

I put my hand on the door.

The metal was cold and had a little give in it.

Nine times, one morning a year, a man had stood right here in the dark.

"You're going to catch cold."

Alister was on his own porch, across the street.

He came down the steps in a gray sweatshirt with the fire company's name on it.

He crossed to me with his pager in his hand.

"Was it bad?" he said.

"She told me why," I said.

"Do you want to tell me?" he asked.

"She says she wasn't going to be left by the last one."

He stood beside me and was quiet.

My hand was still on the mailbox.

I could feel how close he was, a warm shape at my side, and how long I had been cold.

I turned and took hold of the front of his sweatshirt in both fists.

He did not move.

His heart was going under my knuckles, hard and quick.

"Alister," I said.

"Not tonight." He said it very low, and he did not pull away. "You're angry at someone else, and I'm the nearest thing."

"That's your rule?"

"Ask me on a night you're not angry at somebody else."

I laughed. It came out unsteady.

"A fire chief with a rule."

"It's the only one I've got." His mouth moved. "I've never broken it."

I let go of him slowly, one hand and then the other.

Something white was folded into the flag slot on the mailbox, and I pulled it free.

It was a church flyer, printed in blue ink, with a photo of Aunt Verna and a border of pumpkins.

COUNCIL OF CHURCHES HARVEST SUPPER, SUNDAY OCTOBER 26.

CAREGIVER OF THE YEAR: MRS. VERNA ECKERT.

Across the top, in pencil, in the upright hand I knew now, she had written: Honey, I'd like my family there.

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