I wanted to ask: Was that all? Was that really all? But I didn’t. Because I already knew the answer. The letters had told me. The third row had told me. The careful deletion of messages had told me.
That was not all.
But I couldn’t prove that, and even if I could, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“That sounds like Raymond,” I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.
Gloria nodded. She picked up her spoon again. She ate a bite of soup.
“I miss him,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t say that to you. I know he was your husband. But I miss him too. Is that terrible?”
I thought about the woman crying in the third row. About the letters in the shoe box. About forty-three years of friendship and forty-three years of marriage and all the things I would never know for sure.
“No,” I said. “It’s not terrible. It’s just sad.”
She nodded again. We finished our soup. We washed the dishes. I went home.
I have never told anyone about that conversation. Not because it was the most damning thing I heard. Because it was the most honest thing she ever said to me, and I didn’t know what to do with that honesty.
—
The third thing I never told anyone happened in the tenth month.
I went to see Raymond’s brother, Harold. He lived in Savannah, three hours away. I drove there on a Saturday morning, alone, with no clear plan for what I was going to say.
Harold was seventy-four. He had retired from the post office five years ago and spent most of his time fishing. He was a quiet man, quieter than Raymond, which was saying something. He and his wife, Bernice, lived in a small house near the water, and they had never had children, so Harold treated Marcus and Renee like they were his own.
I had not told Harold I was coming. I just showed up, which was unlike me, and he knew something was wrong the moment he opened the door.
“Dot,” he said. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” I said. “Can I come in?”
He stepped aside. Bernice was at the grocery store, he said. We sat in his living room, which smelled like coffee and old books and the faint salt smell that everything in Savannah seemed to carry.
I did not know how to start. I had been thinking about this conversation for weeks, planning what I would say, how I would phrase it. But sitting there in Harold’s living room, looking at his face, which was Raymond’s face but older, softer, less guarded, I could not find the words.
“Harold,” I said finally. “Did Raymond ever talk to you about Gloria?”
He did not answer right away. That was my answer.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You know what I mean.”
He looked down at his hands. They were thick hands, working hands, the hands of a man who had carried mail for thirty years and spent his retirement reeling in fish.
“Dot,” he said. “I don’t think this is a conversation we should have.”
“That’s not an answer.”
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