My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.
PART 2 — TWO HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
To explain the box I have to explain something I did for fifteen years and never told anybody, including my daughters.
It started about four months after she left.
Junia was nine and Willa was seven and they wrote letters. That was Dot’s idea, and it was a good one — she said write to her, tell her about school, and we’ll send them, and it will help.
I had an address. Roland Frayne’s house out on the ridge road in Bristow Vale; everybody in Cattermole County knew where that house was.
We sent the first three in the March.
They came back in April. All three. RETURN TO SENDER stamped across the front, in that purple ink the post office used then.
I stood at the mailbox at the end of the drive at two in the afternoon in my work clothes and looked at three envelopes with my daughters’ handwriting on them.
And I made a decision in about eleven seconds that I have gone over roughly ten thousand times since.
I put them in my jacket, and I went inside, and when Junia asked whether her mom had written back yet I said not yet, sweetheart, the mail’s slow.
I could not do it. I want anybody reading this to sit with that for a second before they judge it. My oldest was nine. I was not going to hand a nine-year-old an envelope with her own handwriting on it and a stamp saying refused.
So I kept them.
And then they kept writing, because children do, and I kept sending them, because I could not bring myself to be the one who stopped it, and they kept coming back.
Two hundred and eleven letters over fifteen years.
The bulk of them in the first four years — that’s when the little ones were young and still believed in it. Then it thinned out. Willa stopped at eleven. Cori stopped at nine and never started again. Bess only ever wrote two, both at Christmas.
Junia wrote the longest. She wrote until she was nineteen. Once a year, on the anniversary of the day, and I know that because I read the last one, later, with her permission, and it is four pages long and it is not angry and that is the worst thing about it.
Tansy has never written a word, because Tansy was nine months old and has no memory of the woman at all and has always, sensibly, treated the whole thing as somebody else’s weather.
They all went in a cardboard box in the attic, bundled by year with kitchen twine, which is a thing I started doing in year two without deciding to.
About sixty of them, spread over the whole fifteen years, did not have the post office stamp on them.
Those had a line of handwriting across the front instead.
Not at this address.
I knew that handwriting. I lived with it for eleven years. It was on the grocery list stuck to my refrigerator for two years after she left because I could not make myself take it down.
She was writing that with her own hand on envelopes addressed in the handwriting of her nine-year-old.
I never told the girls. Not once, in fifteen years. When they asked, in the early days, I said she was far away and that things were hard for her and that it wasn’t about them.
I lied to my children about their mother for a decade and a half to keep them from a purple stamp.
I have been asked since whether I regret it. I do, and I would do it again, and both of those are true at the same time and I have stopped trying to sort them out.
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