His Letters Reached Me Fourteen Years Late, and the First Said Goodbye novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Nine Envelopes
The woman who bought Aunt Verna's house hands Odalys a shoebox of nine letters in Alister McCreary's handwriting; Alister walks up as she reads the oldest line, and she lets him into her mother's house and opens the first letter in front of him.
The woman who bought Aunt Verna's house stood on my mother's porch with a shoebox in her arms.
She had found it that morning on a high shelf in the sewing-room closet, behind a stack of church cookbooks.
She tipped the lid toward me.
Nine white envelopes stood on end inside, and every one said Odalys Eckert in handwriting I had not seen in fourteen years.
It was Alister McCreary's handwriting.
"I almost threw it out with the cookbooks," the woman said.
"Then I saw your name. There are no stamps on them."
I could not make my hands take the box.
I had been back in town for eight days, folding my mother's cardigans into bags for the thrift shop.
I had a tape gun in my back pocket and the porch light on.
"I never saw these," I said.
"I'm sorry." She pushed the box a little closer. "Your aunt moved out so fast. I thought you should have them before your sale."
I took the box.
It weighed almost nothing.
The woman went down the walk and past the old steel mailbox at the curb.
The mailbox had a dent in its door from a snowplow.
I stood there with my thumb on the lid.
The envelopes were not sealed. Every flap had been tucked in, not stuck down.
Somebody had opened them all.
I pulled out the one at the front, the oldest. The paper had gone soft and yellow at the corners.
Inside was a single sheet, folded in thirds.
The first line was written hard enough to dent the page.
You were right to go.
I read it again.
A truck turned onto Fairview Street and came up the block slowly, a red light bar dark on its roof.
It stopped across from my mother's house, at 219.
A man got out in a navy work jacket and stood with one hand on the door.
I knew how he stood before I knew his face.
He crossed the street.
He was thirty-four now, and the hair over his ears had gone gray.
He had got thicker through the shoulders than the boy I remembered.
He stopped at the bottom of the walk and looked at the box.
Then he looked at the letter in my hand.
"Where did you find those?" Alister said.
His voice was lower than I remembered, and slower.
"The woman in Aunt Verna's house found them. In a closet."
"In Verna's closet," he said.
"Yes."
"You never got them," he said.
"No," I said.
He did not move, but his expression hardened into something guarded.
On the back of his left hand there was a burn scar, shiny and pink, that had not been there when we were kids.
He was looking at it, not at me.
"I put them in that mailbox," he said, and he pointed behind him at the one on its post.
"Every third of October. Before light, so I wouldn't have to talk to anybody."
"Alister."
"Nine of them." He let out a short rough sound that was not a laugh.
"I figured you read every one and had nothing to say," he said.
"Alister," I said.
"I've been thinking that for fourteen years."
I stood with my mother's porch light on the side of my face.
"I would have said something," I told him.
"I know that now."
"I would have said a great deal."
He nodded, once.
Then he turned his head and looked across the street at his own front door.
"I'll go," he said. "You should read these by yourself."
"Wait."
I looked at the page.
The second line was shorter than the first.
I read it out loud, standing on my mother's porch, because I wanted to hear how it sounded in his hearing.
"You were right to go. I am not going to wait for you, so do not carry me with you."
The street was very quiet.
A dog barked two houses down and stopped.
"I was twenty," Alister said.
"You meant it."
"I meant every word." He did not look away from me this time. "I'd have said it worse if I'd known how."
For fourteen years I had believed the boy I left had let me walk out of town without a word.
Here were nine envelopes in his handwriting, and the first of them said goodbye.
I did not know which of those two facts was supposed to hurt more.
I knew I did not want him to walk back across that street.
"Come inside," I said.
He stayed where he was.
"You haven't been in this house since you were twenty," I said.
"I want to read the rest of these with the man who wrote them standing in the room."
Alister took his hand off the rail.
He climbed my mother's steps, wiped his boots on her mat, and I held the door.
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