PART4: She Stole My Husband, Then Asked Me to Read His Letter

PART4

I could hear chairs moving around us. “What is the thing?”

She lowered her voice. “The letter.”

I did not move. “The letter,” I repeated.

“He wrote to his wife after he came to me. He wanted to go home, June. He sat at my table and wrote it and cried on it, and he mailed it. I watched him mail it.”

My fingers had gone stiff under hers.

“The next morning,” she continued, “I parked by her mailbox and took it out. I kept it. She never answered because she never got it. He waited by the phone for two weeks. Then he stopped waiting.”

She drew a rough breath. “People think a marriage ends in a courtroom. It can end in a mailbox.”

The caller announced the next game. Nobody at our table daubed a thing.

For forty years, I had carried one story about my life: Ray left. Ray never looked back. Everything I built afterward stood on that certainty. Now a blind woman at a bingo table had removed it with a few sentences, and she did not know whose hand she was holding while she did it.

“You kept it,” I said. My voice came out level. I still do not know how.

“I couldn’t burn it. I tried twice.”

She pulled her purse closer and worked open the clasp with her crooked fingers. From inside, she took an envelope soft as cloth from handling, closed with a strip of tape yellowed with age.

“I carry it now, since my eyes went,” she said. “I read it once in forty years, standing at my stove. I’ve had it by heart ever since.”

She held it toward me.

“Read it to me, June. I know every word, but I’ve only heard it in my own voice, and my voice is the one that stole it. I want to hear it in a kind voice one time before I die.”

I looked down at the name on the front of the envelope, written in handwriting I had not seen since my kitchen had yellow curtains.

My name. My old name.

I slid my finger under the tape and unfolded forty years. Then, in the steadiest voice of my life, I began to read my own letter aloud to the woman who had stolen it.

“Dear…”

My voice caught on the name. Delores tilted her head, listening.

Ray had written that leaving had been a terrible mistake. He said he had been ashamed to call and did not know whether I would speak to him, but he wanted to come home if I would let him. He did not excuse what he had done. He asked for a chance to apologize to me face to face.

It was not a beautiful letter. Ray had never been good with words. Some lines wandered, and one sentence had been crossed out so heavily I could not read what had been underneath. That made it worse somehow. It was plainly him, uncertain and ashamed, trying to ask whether the door was completely closed.

When I reached the end, I read his name and lowered the paper.

Delores was crying without making a sound.

“Again,” she whispered.

“No.”

She flinched. “Please.”

“My name isn’t June.”

Her face stayed turned toward mine. For a second she seemed not to understand, and then her hand slipped away from me.

I told her my first name. I told her the old last name on the envelope had once been mine because Ray had been my husband.

“No,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t be.”

“I recognized you the first night.”

CONTINUE READING PART5…