At first, I did. For months after he died, I would sit out here after Skylar and Ava went to bed, beer going warm beside me, and open the letter because grief has a sick, specific sense of humor. It takes the person and leaves the paper. Leaves the handwriting. Leaves a voice you can almost hear if you hurt yourself hard enough to try.
I don’t do it every day anymore. Only on the nights when I miss him enough to hate the world for having the nerve to keep turning without him in it.
Tonight is one of those nights.
Maybe it was because Ava asked about him at dinner. She was sitting in her booster seat, tomato sauce on her cheek, blonde curls falling into her eyes, pointing at the photo on the wall with one small finger, wanting to know why Pop Rainer was in the picture but not at the table.
Skylar was the first to go quiet.
I did too.
Ava kept eating pasta with the kind of emotional violence only toddlers and drunk men possess, entirely unaware that she had just split my chest open with one question and half a meatball.
Skylar answered because she is better at that kind of thing than I am. She told Ava that Pop Rainer grew very old and very tired, and that his body could not hold on any longer.
Ava frowned, thinking hard, the way she does when something does not sit right with her, an expression she got directly from her mother and that already terrifies me on a daily basis.
Then she asked whether he still loved her.
Skylar looked at me.
I had to leave the table for a minute. Not far. Just to the sink. Just long enough to turn the tap on and stand there, pretending the running water had anything to do with my hands.
The truth is Rainer did love her.
Fuck, he loved that little girl in a way that made everything else in the room irrelevant whenever she was there. Even when he was sick and his body had started betraying him in ways that made me want to put my fist through hospital walls. I didn’t because Skylar would have killed me, and she would have been right.
He held Ava the day she was born. I helped him. That is the part that still hurts me on quiet evenings when the creek is running and the sky is going dark, and I have had enough beer to let it.
The nurses had tried to tell us he should not hold her, that he was too weak, and that perhaps he could gaze at her from the chair beside the bed.
Rainer told them he had been ignoring sensible women for seventy-eight years and saw no reason to ruin his record now.
Skylar laughed first. Then she told the nurse to leave him alone in a tone that made it clear the conversation was over. The nurse apparently agreed and left.
Rainer looked at me and said, “Your wife often threatens people.”
“She is not my wife yet,” I said.
He glanced at Skylar, then back at me with those steady eyes.
“Then fix that.”
Three weeks later, I did.
But that day, in that hospital room, Rainer was smaller than he had been six months before—the cancer having quietly taken things from him, the way it takes everything, without consultation or apology. He smelled of peppermint, the hard little lollies he kept in his shirt pocket because the chemo had made everything else taste wrong, metallic and foreign, not like anything he recognized. He had complained about it once, in that flat Rainer way of complaining that sounded more like a weather report than a grievance, and after that, he never mentioned it again. Just kept the lollies in his pocket and got on with it, because that was the only way Rainer did things.
His hand shook as I placed Ava into his arms.
So did mine.
She was tiny, red-faced, and already furious at the world—a scrap of a thing with Skylar’s mouth and what I can only describeas my temper—arriving fully formed and making its feelings known to everyone in the room.
Rainer looked down at her and the whole world softened around him in a way I had never seen and will never forget.
This man had grumbled his way through every feeling he ever had. He taught me more about love through silence and work. He looked at my daughter and he cried.
One tear. That was all. It slid down a weathered cheek before Rainer looked at me.
