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The earliest convenient time for me to call Richard was right then and there, from the parking lot—so instead I left and drove around, going through the McDonald’s drive-through for coffee and then parking at an overlook near the bridge back to the island. It was one of those cloudless, frigid winter days when the sun is all light and no heat, glaring so brightly off the hoods of passing cars and the pale sides of weathered houses that I could see green afterimages every time I closed my eyes. At the overlook, I sat with the engine running and the heat blasting, waiting for my coffee to cool and looking at the letter Tasha had given me. I recognized Mimi’s handwriting, spidery and old-fashioned.
Dear Shelly,
The Reverend said he would help this letter find its way to you. I trust he will do it—he seems like a good man. I’m afraid my address book has gone missing, or perhaps I’ve mislaid it myself. I seem alwaysto be losing things these days. Sometimes I lose the days themselves. I wonder, are you the woman I remember from all those years ago? Are you there still in the same little house, with the broken picket fence on the outskirts of town?
I saw you there once. You didn’t see me. It was after I sent you away, after Theo, before I left the island. I sat in the car with a kerchief on to hide my hair, sunglasses to hide my face, and watched you hang your washing on the line in the side yard while little Jack played with the clothespins. You were wearing one of my old sundresses, the one with a pattern of blue flowers, which I’d given you that first summer when you came to stay with us. I thought, wasn’t that just a perfect metaphor for everything that had gone so wrong? Oh, it made me angry. I thought about getting out, walking across the street and into your yard, and ripping it right off your back, and that it would be only fair. Not that it would have made us even, of course. Not even close to that.
But I drove away from you that day, and afterward, I was glad that I did. I suppose I had learned at last not to be so rash, not to do the first thing that came into my head. If only I had learned it sooner, how different my life might have been.
I’m not sure what to say to you now. I’m not sure why I’ve told you all this, either. That little memory, of me in the car and you with your washing, that broken fence with no one coming to fix it, it only came to me as I began writing, and I wonder if it won’t be gone again in a moment. Perhaps I am only remembering it now because I am thinking of you, and I don’t like to think of you, Shelly. I despised you for a long time. Some days I still do. But today (I am looking at the calendar as I write this, it is December, in the year 2014) I mean to tell you not that I despise you, but that I forgive you. I couldn’t bear to think of it back then, but the pain you must have felt—that is a pain I know well. A pain that burns a hole inside of you because to express it would also mean confession. It is a terrible burden. I have carried it all my life, mourning the husband I lost, the mistakes I made. I would never wish that pain on anyone. Not even you. Not then and not now.
This is what I wanted to say. I have said it.
Your son wrote to me some time ago, to tell me of your failing health. I didn’t answer him then, but I hope you will not be too proud to accept my help now. The debt I truly owe is one that cannot be repaid with money, but money is what I have—the one thing I have always had, for all the good it’s done me. I have placed a sum in trust for your care, with an additional stipend if you wish to be housed here at Willowcrest. Wouldn’t it be funny, to be once again living under the same roof, here at the end of our lives? But we are both of us too old to hold on to anger.
I do not expect a reply as I understand you can no longer speak or hold a pen. Don’t trouble yourself, as I may well forget having written to you. My clear days seem to be ever fewer, ever further between. I hope, before I lose myself entirely, that I may be forgiven.
Yours,
Miriam Caravasios
The letter was dated two weeks before Christmas.
I let my eyes drift down the page to the bottom, where a postscript was scrawled. The writing was looser, the strokes of the pen less certain.
Do you remember that pipe he smoked, with the flowers and vines? Sometimes I wake up at night to the smell of it, as if he’s just been beside me—or am I dreaming?
I read the letter twice, feeling more and more frustrated at its vagueness. What debt did my grandmother owe to this woman—and what had Shelly done to be turned out of the house all those years ago? The bit about the money, I understood: this was how Shelly had managed to pay for her place at Willowcrest, not that she’d been able to make much of it before she died. I was about to read the letter again when my phone buzzed suddenly in my lap, and I jumped,spilling coffee on myself and splattering the paper. I looked at the incoming call and cursed, tried to decline it, and cursed again when my finger slipped over the wet screen and hitanswerinstead.
“Hello?” came a voice from the phone.
I sighed. “Hi, Richard.”
“Bad time?”
“It’s not ideal. Didn’t you ask me to call you?”
“I did,” he said. “And then I realized that if I were you, I’d probably look at that message and decidenotto call at my earliest convenience, or maybe not even for several days, just to show me who was in charge here.”
“I would have called you.”
“After how long?”
I paused. “Forty-eight hours,” I said, and he guffawed.
“I should have guessed. Women have always been better at playing that particular game.”
“What do you want?”
“You know, Delphine, you and I have never really gotten along,” he said. “Do you know why?”
“Because you’re an asshole?”
“Ha! Walked into that one, didn’t I? But no, that’s not why. It’s because you and I are actually quite alike.”
“I’m not an asshole,” I said.
“No,” he said, his tone surprisingly agreeable. “No such thing as a lady asshole. At your age, we call it sass. Another twenty years and someone might call you a bitch. Not me, of course. I’d never.”
