Chapter 19: Ninety-Nine Pencil Lines

Hattie left the shoebox on the hot plate shelf at six in the morning and did not stay to explain.

"She kept them in my closet," was all she said. "She said if she ever looked at them alone she'd burn them."

Percy sat down on the bare mattress and lifted the lid.

Ninety-nine envelopes lay inside, sorted by date, each in his own handwriting or his lawyer's.

He knew what they were.

He had written the first one in a hospital bed, three days after he woke up.

He had never opened one of them again after he sent it.

He opened the first.

His own request sat on the top of the page, cold and formal, asking for a release from a marriage he did not remember.

Below it, in the white space, a few lines of pencil had been rubbed soft by a thumb.

*No. You are not yourself yet. Please eat something.*

He opened the fourteenth.

*No. I saw you standing at the window this morning. You looked tired. Close your eyes for an hour.*

The fortieth was typed on his mother's lawyer's paper.

*No. This isn't your voice. You write shorter than this.*

He had to put the letter down.

He sat with his hands over his face, and breathed, and picked it up again.

The seventy-seventh said: *No. It was our anniversary on the fourth. I did not say anything. You did not know.*

The ninety-ninth was the last.

The pencil had been pressed hard enough to dent the paper.

*No. One more and I'll have to start believing you mean it.*

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