Chapter 4 - What David Asked Him to Do
Walter looked down at the pie box on the floor. "It'll make more sense if I go back further."
"Then go back."
"I knew David," he said. "Not for long. The last few years of his life. We met in a cardiac rehab walking group over at Saint Anne's."
I just stared at him. "You knew my husband."
"We got to be friends. You end up talking a lot, walking those laps together."
"Then why did he never once say your name to me?"
Walter gave me a worn-out smile. "Your husband didn't say much about any part of his life, Margaret. He kept everything in separate boxes. You know that better than I do."
I did know that. It stung to hear a stranger say it out loud.
Walter rubbed his hands together. "Back then, I wasn't speaking to my daughter. Susan. We'd let a lot of stubbornness turn to concrete between us."
"Over what?"
"Nothing you could point to," he said. "Little arguments, stacked up over years, until the silence just won."
He had convinced himself Susan wanted nothing to do with him. David didn't buy it.
"He kept telling me to write to her. I kept saying she'd never write back. David called that cowardly nonsense, right to my face."
One afternoon, David sat next to him in a diner booth and made him write the note he had been refusing to send.
Walter recited it to me from memory, word for word.
"I don't need us to agree about the past. I'd just like to know you now."
Susan wrote back.
He looked straight at me. "Your husband gave me my daughter back."
Then he said, "When David got sicker, he finally told me what scared him most about leaving you."
My hands tightened on the arms of the chair. "And what exactly did my husband say about me?"
Walter winced. "He said you'd spent your whole life being needed. He was afraid that once he was gone, you'd mistake being lonely for being loyal. That you'd fold yourself back into everyone else's life and just disappear."
"He never asked me to chase you," Walter added quickly. "Nothing like what happened between us. Please believe that."
"Then what did he ask?"
Walter hesitated. "He told me, 'If you ever get the chance, don't let her vanish into everybody else's life. Remind her she's still got one of her own.'"
I stared at him for a long moment.
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"I loved David for forty-six years," I said. "That did not give him the right to leave instructions about how I should be a widow."
"He didn't," Walter said immediately. "He didn't leave instructions."
