Chapter 5: What the Letters Said
I didn't read them all that day.
I read four.
Then I closed the box and went to my room and lay on my bed with my arm over my eyes, and I didn't come down for dinner until Ray knocked on my door and said there was food.
He didn't ask how I was.
He just said there was food.
That was Ray.
Over the next week I read two more.
Then one more after that.
I couldn't do them all at once — not because they were painful, though some of them were, but because each one needed room.
They were dense with her.
With the version of her that existed before she learned to be careful.
The fourth letter was from the year I turned seven.
She'd written about a parent-teacher conference where my teacher had said I was "unusually empathetic for a boy my age" and how she'd cried in the car afterward, alone, because there was no one to tell.
The seventh letter was from the year I turned ten.
She'd written about a man she'd dated briefly — not Ray, someone before Ray — and how she'd ended it because he'd been impatient with me once at a restaurant and she'd known immediately, in her body, that it was over.
*I don't think you'll ever know how much I've measured every person by you,* she wrote.
*How many things I've walked away from because they didn't fit around you right.
I don't say this so you'll feel guilty.
I say it so you'll know you were always the center of it.
Even when I was too tired to show it.*
I read that one three times.
The ninth letter — the year I turned twelve — was the one that broke me open a little.
She'd written about my father.
Not with anger.
With something more honest than anger.
*I've been thinking about Dennis lately.
Not missing him — I stopped that a long time ago.
But thinking about what kind of man walks away from something small and helpless and just — keeps walking.
And I've decided I don't think he's a monster.
I think he was just very young and very afraid and he made a choice that he probably told himself was temporary and then woke up one day and it had been nine years.*
*I'm not forgiving him.
I want to be clear about that.
But I'm trying to understand him, because you're going to have to decide what to do with him someday, and I don't want my anger to be the thing that makes that decision for you.*
*That part is yours.
I'm keeping my anger.
You get to keep something else.*
I sat with that one for a long time.
I brought it downstairs eventually.
Mom was at the kitchen table with her reading glasses on, going through mail.
Ray was somewhere in the back of the house — I could hear the low sound of a baseball game on the radio.
I set the letter on the table in front of her.
She looked at it.
Then at me.
"You read this one," I said.
"I remember what I wrote."
"I know.
Read it again."
She picked it up.
I watched her eyes move across it.
When she got to the end she took her glasses off and set them on the table.
"I meant it," she said.
"I know you did." I sat down.
"Is that how you actually feel?
Still?"
She thought about it.
Really thought — I could see her working through it.
"I think I was being generous when I wrote that," she said.
"I think I was trying to be the kind of mother who gave you room to make your own choices."
"And now?"
"Now I've watched him show up with a bow on a car and say your stepdad could never compete with this in front of Ray." She folded the letter carefully along its original creases.
"So I'm a little less generous than I was at forty-two."
I almost smiled.
"Fair."
"But the last part still stands," she said.
"The decision is yours.
I mean that."
Ray appeared in the doorway.
He looked at the letter in her hands, then at me.
"You eating?" he said.
"Yeah."
He went to the fridge.
That was the whole conversation.
But later, after dinner, when Mom had gone to bed early because she had a six a.m.
shift, Ray and I sat on the back porch.
The baseball game had ended.
It was quiet.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Yeah."
"When she gave you the letters.
Two years ago.
When she was sick." I looked at the yard.
"Were you scared?"
Ray was quiet for a moment.
"Yeah," he said.
"How scared?"
He picked at the label on his water bottle.
"The kind where you don't sleep right for three weeks and you don't tell her because she's already dealing with enough."
I nodded.
"Did you think she wasn't going to make it?"
"There were a few days," he said.
"Yeah."
The yard was dark except for the neighbor's porch light bleeding through the fence.
"She told me it wasn't serious," I said.
"She didn't want you to be scared."
"I know." I paused.
"I was scared anyway.
I just didn't know what I was scared of."
Ray looked at me.
"You knew something was wrong," he said.
"You always do.
You just didn't have the information to name it."
That was probably the most words Ray had ever said to me in one go about something that wasn't homework or a game.
I looked at him.
"Thank you," I said.
"For the box."
He nodded.
Looked back at the yard.
"She needed someone to keep them safe," he said.
"That's all."
It wasn't all.
We both knew it wasn't all.
But that was how Ray said things — small, and true, and enough.
My phone buzzed on the armrest.
I looked at the screen.
It was a number I didn't recognize.
May you like
But the area code was the same as my father's.
I let it ring.
