Chapter 15: Fifteen Junes

Bernard left the way he always left, with a wave and a promise to bring more soup.

Brock went in the second truck, holding his nose shut with a glove.

Ashgrove's wolves followed in a line, and not one of them looked back at the black stairs of my father's porch.

Corbin stayed.

He did not come near me.

He leaned on his tailgate across the yard with his gloved hand in his jacket pocket, and he waited.

I sat down on the one step the fire had spared.

The shoebox was warm from the kitchen table.

"I can send you away," I said. "I'd like to read these alone."

"Then I'll go."

"I didn't say go. I said I could."

He nodded and stayed where he was.

The first envelope was soft with age.

The paper had gone the color of weak tea, and the handwriting was a twelve-year-old's, square and careful and pressed hard into the page.

Dear Larissa.

You won't remember me.

That is all right.

I am writing to say that I think of you.

Wynne is seven and bites, and she says hello.

I have nothing else to tell you, so I am telling you about Wynne.

I laughed before I could stop it.

"She did bite," Corbin called across the yard. "I have a scar."

"You were twelve and you wrote me about your sister's teeth."

"I couldn't write about anything else."

I read the next one, and the next.

Thirteen, and the handwriting got slanted.

He told me he had a dog.

At fourteen he told me the dog had eaten his homework.

At fifteen the dog was a hound named for a baseball player, and he had taught it to carry a thermos.

I looked up.

"You don't have a dog."

"No."

"You wrote about this dog for years."

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