Chapter 11: The Letter

She was forty-one, a dental hygienist from Daly City, and she stood in our dining room holding a yellow envelope against her chest.

My brothers sat along both sides of the long table.

I sat at the end, under our mother's portrait, because Brendan had pulled out that chair for me and I hadn't known how to refuse.

Lawson had driven me home from the laundromat without a word.

He now sat in his car at the bottom of the drive with the engine off, and I had not asked him to, and I knew he'd stay there until dark.

"My aunt died in March," the woman said.

"She was a night nurse for thirty years."

She shifted the envelope against her chest.

"I found this in her Bible, with a note on the front that said to mail it after her funeral, and I didn't, because I didn't understand it."

"Then my daughter showed me your brother's video."

She looked at Fergus, and he put his hands over his face.

"I'm so sorry," she said.

"I think my aunt wanted somebody to know."

She laid the envelope on the table and stepped back toward the door.

"I'll wait in the hall," she said.

Brendan picked it up.

The paper was thin and blue, and it had been folded and unfolded a great many times.

He read it aloud, in the flat voice he used for company minutes, and by the third line it was not flat anymore.

To whoever finds this,

I was a night nurse on the maternity floor of St. Brigid's on the eleventh of October, twenty-five years ago.

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