Chapter 5 - What the Letters Said
I didn't read them all that night. I read four. Then I closed the lid, went up to my room, and lay on my bed with my arm over my eyes. I didn't come down for dinner until Wade knocked and said there was food.
He didn't ask how I was doing. He just said there was food. That was Wade.
Over the next week I got through two more. Then one more after that. I couldn't take them all at once — not because they hurt, though some of them did, but because each one needed space around it. They were thick with her. With the version of her that existed before she taught herself to be careful.
The letter from the year I turned seven was about a parent-teacher conference where my teacher called me "unusually tuned in to other people for a boy his age." Mom wrote that she'd sat in the car in the school lot afterward and cried, alone, because there was nobody to tell.
The one from the year I turned ten was about a man she'd dated for a little while — not Wade, somebody before Wade. She ended it because he'd gotten short with me once at a restaurant and she'd known right then, in her body, that it was done.
I don't think you'll ever understand how much I've measured every single person against you, she wrote. How many things I've walked away from because they didn't fit right around you. I'm not telling you this so you'll feel like you owe me. I'm telling you so you'll know you were always the center of it. Even the times I was too worn out to show it.
I read that one three times.
The letter from the year I turned twelve was the one that cracked something open in me. She'd written about my father. Not with anger. With something more honest than anger.
I've been thinking about Gary lately. Not missing him — I quit that a long time ago. But thinking about what kind of man walks away from something that small and helpless and just keeps on walking. And I've decided he's not a monster. I think he was very young and very scared and he made a choice he told himself was temporary, and then he woke up one morning 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 one day you're going to have to decide what to do with him, and I don't want my anger making 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.
Eventually I brought it downstairs. Mom was at the kitchen table with her reading glasses on, going through a stack of mail. Wade was somewhere in the back of the house — I could hear a ballgame turned low on the radio.
I put the letter on the table in front of her.
She looked at it. Then at me. "You read this one."
"I know what I wrote."
"I know you do. Read it again."
She picked it up. I watched her eyes move down the page. When she got to the bottom 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 still how you feel? Now?"
She thought about it. Really thought — I could see her turning it over.
"I think I was being generous when I wrote that," she said. "I think I was trying to be the kind of mother who left you room to make up your own mind."
"And now?"
"Now I've watched him roll up with a bow on a car and tell you your stepdad could never compete, right to Wade's face." She folded the letter back along its old 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."
Wade appeared in the doorway. He looked at the letter in her hand, then at me. "You eating?"
"Yeah."
He went to the fridge. That was the whole conversation.
But later, after dinner, once Mom had gone to bed early for a six a.m. shift, Wade and I sat out on the back porch. The ballgame was over. 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 out at the yard. "Were you scared?"
Wade was quiet a moment. "Yeah."
"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 say anything to her, because she's already got enough on her."
I nodded. "Did you think she wasn't going to make it?"
"There were a few days there," he said. "Yeah."
The yard was dark except for the neighbor's porch light coming through the fence slats.
"She told me it wasn't serious," I said.
"She didn't want you scared."
"I know." I paused. "I was scared anyway. I just didn't know what I was scared of."
Wade looked over at me. "You knew something was wrong," he said. "You always do. You just didn't have enough to put a name on it."
That was probably the most words Wade had ever strung together for me at one time about something that wasn't homework or a game.
I looked at him. "Thank you. For the box."
He nodded. Looked back out at the yard. "She needed somebody to keep them safe. That's all."
It wasn't all. We both knew it wasn't all. But that was how Wade said things — small, and true, and enough.
May you like
My phone buzzed on the arm of the chair. I looked at the screen. A number I didn't know. But the area code matched my father's.
I let it ring out.
