And I know that the woman crying in the third row at my husband’s funeral loved him, too, in whatever form that love took. And that she has to live with what she knows the same way I live with what I know.
That is not nothing. That is its own kind of weight.
—
I wake up in my house that is mine now. I make my coffee. I sit at the window in the early morning before the neighborhood starts, and I think about what I want the rest of this life to look like.
Not what it was supposed to look like. Not what anyone else thinks it should look like. What I want it to look like.
That part is new.
That part I’ll take.
The shoe box stayed on my nightstand for three months. I would look at it sometimes, usually in the morning when the light was still soft, sometimes late at night when sleep wouldn’t come. I never opened it again during those three months. I didn’t need to. The letters were inside my head now, every line of the two I had read fully and the one I had read partially. The way Gloria wrote about him in that first letter, the way she described his hands before I had ever held them. The way the last letter said goodbye without ever saying what was ending.
One night I got up at two in the morning and carried the box to the kitchen. I stood there for a long time with it in my hands. The trash can was under the sink. The recycling bin was in the garage. Neither of those felt right.
What I did instead was take the box upstairs to the attic. I put it in an old suitcase that had belonged to my mother, the one with the broken latch that I had been meaning to fix for fifteen years. I closed the suitcase and I pushed it to the back corner where the roof sloped down low and where I knew I would have to crawl to reach it again.
That was not a decision about whether to keep the letters or throw them away. That was a decision about when I would deal with them.
I chose later.
Later is still waiting.
—
Renee asked me once, about eight months after the funeral, if something was wrong between me and Gloria. She said it carefully, the way adult children ask things they are not sure they want the answer to.
I told her that friendships change as you get older. That forty years is a long time and that people grow in different directions. That there was nothing wrong exactly, just something different.
She looked at me for a beat longer than necessary, and I could see her trying to decide whether to push. Renee has always been able to read me in a way that is both a comfort and an inconvenience. She got her father’s steadiness and my attention to detail, which means she notices things and does not rush to conclusions.
“Okay, Mama,” she said finally. “You know I’m here.”
I did know. I still know. That is one of the things I hold onto.
Marcus called less often but checked in differently. He would send me articles he thought I would find interesting, links to research about childhood literacy because he knew that was still my thing. He would text me photos of his kids, my grandkids, with captions like “Lost another tooth” or “First soccer game.” He was not a man who asked direct questions about feelings, but he was a man who showed up. He flew in for Raymond’s birthday, the first one after he died, and spent the whole weekend fixing things around the house that I hadn’t even mentioned needed fixing.
He noticed them himself. That is who Marcus is.
I have thought about whether I should tell them. Both of them. What the letters said. What I suspect. What I know and what I don’t know. I have turned it over in my mind more times than I can count, the way you turn a key in a lock that won’t open, hoping that maybe this time it will be different.
Each time I come back to the same place: Their father is dead. He cannot defend himself, cannot explain, cannot give his side of a story they never knew existed. And I would be the one putting this thing into their hands, this thing they did not ask for and cannot give back.
What would it serve?
That is the question I cannot answer in a way that makes telling them worth it. They loved him. He was a good father. He showed up for recitals and parent-teacher conferences and soccer games. He taught Marcus how to change a tire and taught Renee how to balance a checkbook and walked both of them down aisles at their weddings with tears in his eyes that he did not try to hide.
That man existed. That man was real.
The man who wrote letters to Gloria or received letters from her or whatever actually happened between them. That man existed too.
I have had to learn that both things can be true at the same time.
Continued on the next page
