She came by three days after the funeral. Brought food, which was Gloria, always knowing that the practical things matter. We sat at my kitchen table and talked for two hours and it was almost completely normal.
She was attentive and present and she made me laugh twice, which was a gift. But there was something slightly off in her calibration. A beat too long before she answered certain questions. A care in how she was holding herself that was almost imperceptible, but that I noticed because forty years of friendship means you know someone’s body language better than your own sometimes.
I didn’t say anything. I watched and I filed it and I let it sit.
—
The thing that broke it open was not dramatic.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, six weeks after the funeral. I was going through the last of Raymond’s things in the bedroom closet, which I had been putting off because it was the last task and I knew that finishing it would close something.
I was working through it methodically the way I do things. His suits. His shoes. The box of documents on the top shelf that I had already sorted but wanted to go through once more.
Behind that box, pushed to the back of the shelf in a way that required intention, there was a smaller box I had not seen before.
It was a shoe box. It was taped shut, and Raymond had not been a man who taped things shut without reason.
I sat down on the edge of the bed with that box in my hands for a while before I opened it. I already knew, the way you know things before you know them. That particular dread that isn’t quite surprise.
I opened it anyway because not opening it was also a choice and not one I was willing to make.
There were letters inside. Not many. Eleven, I counted almost automatically, the way my teacher brain counts things without being asked. Written on paper by hand, which told me they were old.
The handwriting on the outside of each envelope was the same, and I recognized it the way I would have recognized my own name written by that hand. Because I had seen that handwriting on birthday cards and grocery lists and a note once slipped under my door when I was having a bad week that said simply, “I see you. I’m here.”
Gloria’s handwriting.
I sat with those letters in my hands for a long time. I didn’t read all of them that day. I read the first two and the last one, and then I put them back in the box and put the box on the nightstand and sat in that room until the light changed.
The first letter was from before Raymond and I were married. That landed differently than I expected it to because it pushed the beginning back to a place before I had even entered the story.
The last letter had no date on it, but the paper was less yellowed, which meant it was newer. And what it said was brief and careful and said goodbye in a way that implied something had ended, though it didn’t say what or why.
What I understood from those three letters was this: Gloria and Raymond had something between them that began before I knew either of them and that had, at some point, ended.
What I did not know was when. Or what it had been exactly for all those years in between. Whether it was something that lived only in those letters or something that had continued alongside everything else. Whether the ending referenced in the last letter had been recent or decades ago.
Those were the questions I sat with.
I am still sitting with some of them.
Continued on the next page
