Chapter 3: What the Letter Said
I drove her home.
She sat in the passenger seat with the bouquet in her lap, her hands folded over the stems, and she didn't speak for the first ten minutes.
I didn't push her.
I kept both hands on the wheel and watched the road and tried to understand what I had just been told.
My mother had been engaged before my father.
The man had d*ed.
She had never told anyone.
And for thirty years, my father had known.
I pulled into their driveway and turned off the engine.
"Come inside," I said.
"Let me make you tea."
"Your father will be up."
"It's not even eight.
He sleeps until nine on Saturdays."
She looked at the front door for a moment, then nodded.
We went in through the side entrance, into the kitchen.
I put the kettle on.
She sat at the table and set the bouquet down in front of her, smoothing the ribbon around the stems the way you'd straighten a photograph on a wall.
"Can I read the letter?" I asked.
She slid the envelope across the table without looking up.
The paper inside was thin, the kind that yellows at the fold lines.
The handwriting was small and slanted — my Aunt Ruth's hand, though I barely recognized it.
Ruth had d*ed when I was eleven.
I had only a child's memory of her: a tall woman who smelled like talcum powder and never stayed long at family dinners.
I read the letter slowly.
It was dated March 1994.
My parents had been married for twelve years by then.
I was seven years old.
*Dear Robert,* it began.
*I'm writing this because I can't say it to your face and because I think you deserve to know the truth, even if you decide to do nothing with it.*
*Before she married you, Eleanor was engaged to a man named Thomas Calloway.
They were to be married in June of 1981.
He d*ed in a car accident three days before the wedding.
Eleanor never spoke of it publicly, but I knew.
A friend of mine was close to the Calloway family.
Eleanor grieved privately and moved on, and I believe she loves you genuinely.
But she has never told you this.
I don't know why.
Perhaps she couldn't find the words.
Perhaps she was afraid of what you'd think.*
*I'm not writing this to cause harm.
I'm writing it because secrets have a way of surfacing at the worst possible time, and I would rather you hear it from me, with love, than from somewhere else.*
*Whatever you decide to do with this, Robert — please be gentle with her.
She is a good woman.
She has always been a good woman.*
*With love, Ruth.*
I set the letter down.
The kettle began to whistle.
Neither of us moved.
"She was trying to protect you," I finally said.
"I know." My mother's voice was barely above a whisper.
"That's what makes it harder."
"Harder than what?"
She looked up at me then, and her eyes were dry now, which somehow made it worse.
"Harder than not knowing whether your father has spent thirty years pretending.
Pretending nothing was wrong.
Pretending he didn't know.
Pretending every anniversary, every birthday, every quiet evening — that he didn't have this letter sitting in his desk."
I got up and poured the tea.
I set her cup in front of her and sat back down.
"Maybe he kept it because he didn't want to upset you," I said.
"Maybe."
"Maybe he read it and decided it didn't change anything for him."
"Maybe."
"Mom."
She wrapped both hands around the cup.
"What if it changed everything for him," she said quietly, "and he just never told me?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
We sat in the kitchen while the house stayed quiet around us.
The clock on the wall ticked.
Outside, a car passed slowly on the street.
May you like
Then we heard the creak of the floorboards overhead.
My father was awake.
