Chapter 4: The Man at the Edge of the Garden
I heard the back door open.
I heard Carol's voice, low, and then a silence, and then footsteps on the wooden porch steps — slow, careful footsteps, the kind that belong to someone who has learned not to move too fast toward things they want.
I did not stand up.
I sat at the table with my hands around the water glass and I waited, and then Thomas Reed walked through the door of my daughter's kitchen and stopped four feet away from me.
Eighty-two years old.
I knew because I had never stopped counting his birthdays, even after I believed there was no one left to celebrate them.
White-haired, yes.
Thinner than I remembered.
A small scar above his left eyebrow that hadn't been there before.
But the way he stood — weight slightly forward, hands open at his sides — that was exactly the same.
That was the Thomas who had stood on my parents' front porch the night he asked my father's permission and then immediately tripped on the welcome mat coming back down the steps.
I had loved him for that trip on the welcome mat.
I had loved him for sixty years, half of them believing he was gone.
"Eleanor," he said.
Just my name.
Nothing else.
But the way he said it — like he had been holding it carefully in his mouth for a very long time and was only now allowing himself to set it down — undid something in my chest that I had not known was still tied.
"You should have fought harder to find me," I said.
He didn't flinch.
"I know."
"Four months of letters and then you stopped.
You believed her."
"I believed what you wrote back to me."
"That wasn't me."
"I know that now.
I didn't know it then." He took one step closer.
"Eleanor, I was twenty-nine years old and I had just spent eleven days unconscious in a hospital bed and the woman I was going to marry wrote me a letter in her own handwriting telling me she had moved on." His voice was steady but his hands were not.
"I didn't stop because I didn't care.
I stopped because I thought continuing would only hurt you more."
"It hurt me more when you stopped."
"I know."
"I buried you.
I had a service.
I wore black for a year."
"I know."
"Don't just keep saying you know, Thomas.
Tell me something I don't know."
He was quiet for a moment.
Carol had disappeared — I heard her in the other room, keeping the grandchildren occupied, giving us the space she owed us.
"I kept the ring," he said.
"I never took it off the chain.
Every person I met in fifty years, every time someone asked why I never remarried, I told them I had already found the person I wanted to marry.
I just hadn't been able to get back to her yet."
The water glass was very cold in my hands.
"That's a long time to wait," I said.
"You were worth waiting for."
"You don't know who I am anymore.
I'm eighty years old.
I'm not the woman you were going to marry."
"No," he said.
"You're the woman she became.
I'd like to know her, if she'll let me."
I looked at him for a long moment.
At the scar above his eyebrow.
At the slight tremor in his right hand that matched the one in mine.
At the way he was still standing with his weight forward, still leaning toward me the way he always had, as if I were a direction rather than a person.
"Sit down," I said.
"There's too much food in this house and I haven't eaten anything and I suspect you haven't either."
Something moved across his face.
Not quite a smile yet.
Something that was preparing to become one.
"I drove four hours," he said.
"Then you're definitely hungry."
He sat down across from me.
Maya materialized immediately from somewhere, the way children do, and placed a plate of something in front of him with the same grave ceremony she had used with my water glass.
"Thank you," Thomas said to her, very seriously.
"You're welcome, Grandpa Thomas," she said, and went back to wherever she had come from.
We both looked at the empty doorway she had vanished through.
"She's been calling me that for two years," Thomas said quietly.
"Since the first time Carol introduced us.
I didn't correct her." He paused.
"I didn't want to."
"Neither do I," I said.
He looked at me then — really looked at me — and I let him.
I was eighty years old and I had earned the right to be looked at without apology.
"I have to ask you something," I said.
"Anything."
"The woman who wrote those letters back to you.
Pretending to be me." I kept my voice even.
"Did you keep them?"
His expression shifted.
"Yes," he said carefully.
"I kept everything you — everything I believed you — had written to me."
"I want to read them."
A pause.
"Eleanor—"
"I want to read what my mother told you I said.
I want to know exactly what she wrote."
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.
He had come prepared, then.
He had known, or hoped, that this conversation would happen tonight.
He set a small bundle of envelopes on the table beside the one I had already read.
May you like
The handwriting on the outside of each one was my mother's.
But the name signed at the bottom of every letter, I already knew, would be mine.
