Chapter 182: The Letter I Could Not Start
My father wrote me one letter in the same month for each of the first eight years of my marriage, and he never mailed any of them.
They had lived in Vera's box before they lived in my study. Eight envelopes in his square hand, each marked with a year.
The first was dated the year I married Grant. I did not read that stretch of years often.
But the night after the hall of fame, with his name still ringing in my ears, I did what I always do when something is ringing.
I went to the letters.
I took the shoebox to the kitchen table.
I spread the eight letters in order and made myself begin again.
I opened the first one, the letter from my wedding year.
It was gentle.
Dear Nora, it said. Marriage is a contract two people renegotiate daily. I hope you never have to read the fine print of yours.
Eight years of letters. Hope first. Concern later. By year seven, one sentence had taken me an hour to cross.
The fourth letter caught under my hand.
I almost skipped it. Some pages you keep forever by not reopening them.
He had been kind in it. That was the unbearable part.
Grant, he wrote, was a man who loved audiences, and I should remember that audiences leave.
The separate page marked Read me last still carried his final instruction.
Forgive them when you are strong enough. Not before.
I had read that line a hundred times. It still worked on me like a key.
Owen found me at midnight with the letters spread like a hand of cards.
You are doing the thing, he said, where you organize a feeling.
I am organizing a feeling, I admitted.
He kissed the top of my head and went to bed. Owen knows which arguments are requests for quiet company.
When the house was dark, I admitted what the night had been building toward.
He had written for eight years of a marriage he watched carefully and still let me choose. I had never once written back.
It was time to answer him.
Not out loud. Not at the grave, not yet. In the form he had taught me to trust. Written. Dated. Signed.
In the study I took out his stationery, the heavy cream sheets he used to order by the box, the ones that outlived him.
I uncapped a pen.
Dear Dad.
Two words.
The pen stayed in the air. The rest of the page stayed white.
I told myself it was the hour. I told myself the first line of a letter to a dead man should not be written tired.
Both things were true. Neither was the reason.
The reason was that I knew what the letter had to say, and not yet how to carry it.
It had to hold the oysters and the envelope. The courtrooms. The hearings. Owen. Vera, of all people.
Some letters you cannot write until the story they belong to has finished happening.
Mine had not finished. I could feel it. There was one more room somewhere, one more table, one more page not yet turned.
I put the sheet back in the shoebox, blank except for two words.
Not tonight, I told the empty study. Soon.
The study did not argue. It had his patience. It had been practicing for decades.
I went to bed, and Owen, half asleep, pulled me in without opening his eyes.
Did the letter win? he asked.
The letter is winning, I said.
That was the truth, and it was also a promise.
What I did not know was how soon the letter would be due.
Or that when I finally wrote it, I would not leave it in any box.
I would carry it across town, in my own hand, to the address he had been pointing at all along.