The Secret Letters (2 page)

I was crossing Main Street one day on my way to work when I heard Pam's ringtone on my cellphone, some rap song she'd downloaded for me. In addition to being smarter and better-looking than me, she was a whole lot cooler. A fat old guy on a Harley screamed at me for getting in his way, and I screamed back that he should go fuck himself, though since he was on a Harley, he couldn't hear anything but his own pistons. Back in the day, my twin brother Donny and I had often buzzed through town like that on his brand new Triumph.

We thought we would live forever. And maybe he would have if he hadn't ridden out alone on a rainy day, if he hadn't skidded on the Beltway, if the truck had seen him. I tried not to think about it, but it was always with me. He was my twin, and ever since he died, part of me felt as if it was missing, like an arm or a leg, but invisible. When he first died, people told me to try talking to him like he was still there, and I did that for a while, but he didn't seem to respond in any way and wherever he was now, he definitely wasn't saying anything. I'd say I was glad my mother was with him now except that I don't believe in stuff like that. They were both just gone.

For a few weeks after my mother's funeral, people kept stopping by the house with sloppy tuna casseroles and stale cakes, but then they went back to their lives. I kept trying to go back to my life, too. Six days a week, I worked lunch or dinner or both, slept, then got up and did it again. It wasn't like I was in the habit of seeing my mother every day, or even phoning her more than two or three times a week, so in a weird way, most of the time everything seemed the same. But on my day off when I would normally have stopped by the house for dinner, I was at loose ends. I'd go into the Wild Hare and sit at the bar, even though I wasn't working, and maybe I got a little too hammered a few times, and Milo, my boss, had to walk me home, though lucky for him
I lived just across the street.

“I'm late to work,” I said to Pam. “What's up?”

“I have to show you something. Come over here when you get off.”

“That's after midnight.”

“Just do it.”

“Where am I going?” I asked, though I had no intention of doing what she wanted.

“Mom's.”

***

“You're late,” Hector said when he saw me. He said this every day, but always sounded surprised.

“Sorry.” That was what I always said.

“Don't let it happen again.” He sounded less pissed off than usual. He was the head chef and could be moody, but he had been a little nicer to me since my mother died. I had told him I was in a depression, and he believed me. Every so often, I began to believe it myself. I had never been too eager to get up in the morning, but lately I had to really struggle out of bed. Everything felt gray and sad. The trees were budding, birds were singing, but it didn't help. I guess I must have looked weird one day, because Hector asked me about it, and I told him I was in mourning. That didn't seem like exactly the right word for what I was in, but he nodded like I had said something really smart and left me alone.

I grabbed my white coat and hat off a peg on the wall. The hat gave me hat-hair, but Hector always yelled at me when I forgot to wear it.

“You can finish up these crabcakes,” he said, handing me his spatula like he was doing me a big favor.

Business was steady for hours, and by the time I got off I was ready to go home,
have a vodka and tonic, and call it a night, but then I remembered I'd sort of told Pam I'd go over to Mom's. On my way across the street to my apartment, I called to tell her I wasn't coming, but she started pestering me again and wouldn't let it go. There was never any point in arguing with anyone in my family, so I turned around, found my car in front of the Wild Hare with a parking ticket on it as usual, since there was nowhere to park for free any more. As I drove up Main Street, spring rain was just starting to drizzle. Our house was only a few blocks from the Hare, but it was uphill all the way, and none of us ever walked if we could help it, except Ricky, who usually didn't have a driver's license thanks to his fondness for drinking and driving. I parked across the street so no one would ram my car on the blind curve. In the old days, we were happy when some drunk totaled one of our rusty junkers, since insurance used to cover stuff like that and we could go buy a new one, but nowadays they didn't cover shit.

I ran across the street between raindrops. The light was on in the living room window. Our house still looked the same, with its sagging front porch, peeling brown paint, and patchy shingles, like it didn't know Mom wasn't there, and for a second I forgot, too, then remembered with what felt like a punch to the stomach. The screen door creaked the same as always, and the dogs, Sally and Max, heard and ran to tackle me. We hadn't figured out what was going to happen to them when we sold the house. I couldn't have pets in my apartment, and Pam didn't want them, because her townhouse didn't have a fenced yard, and she didn't have time to walk dogs, she said, though she seemed to have time to do a bunch of other stuff. Norma had never been a dog person, Tim was out of the picture, so that basically left Ricky, who could barely take care of himself. The dogs were the only thing our mother had left no instructions about. There was no way we were going to give them to strangers, let alone the pound, so we just kept acting like the problem would magically solve itself, like some talent scout would see them barking in the yard and decide to cast them in a remake of
The Incredible
Journey
.

I patted Sally and scratched behind her ears the way she required, and she drooled over me. We figured she was part St. Bernard, though there was no way to be sure. Max, mostly shepherd, had better manners, unless you were a groundhog. I expected to find Pam upstairs in our old bedroom, but she was heading down the hall from our mother's room. She was in PJs and seemed hyper, like she'd eaten too much Halloween candy.

“Okay, what am I doing here?” I asked.

She motioned for me to follow.

A cyclone had touched down once in the woods behind our house, so I knew exactly what that looked like, and my mother's room looked like that: piles of tent-like flower-print dresses heaped on the bed, old costume jewelry, knickknacks, and cheaply framed photographs spilling from boxes in every corner. A huge Ziploc bag full of old makeup on the dressing table, with Mom's trademark orange-red lipstick on the side. The circle of lights around the mirror above the dressing table with a few of the bulbs burned out. A huge blue bathrobe draped over a chair, like Pam had been wearing it. Seeing my mother's stuff all over the place made me feel sick, and scared. It was all that was left of her, and now it had exploded everywhere. I wanted to put everything back together, but there was no point.

“This better be good,” I said, clearing a space for myself between stacks of giant dresses on the pink bedspread my grandmother had crocheted. Mammaw always used to give me candy till my mother told her to quit because I was a little porker. I was still a few pounds overweight as Mom always used to remind me, like she wasn't, and it was Mammaw's fault, but I still loved her, though she'd been gone a long time. Mammaw used to stick up for me when no one else did, and when my mother yelled at me, she'd wrap her arms around me and say, “Cynthia, you leave my angel-child alone.” I
wondered what Pam was planning to do with the bedspread. I thought maybe I'd take it, but it was for a king-size bed and I only had a queen. There was probably a bunch of other stuff I might want, but there was no room in my apartment. I figured someone should take a few boxes of crap down to one of the antique shops in town where they called an old Happy Meal toy a “collectible,” but I didn't have the stomach for it.

Pam handed me a yellowed envelope with “Cynthia Barlow” and a P.O. address in neat handwriting on the front. I fished out a small piece of paper.

“‘Baby,'” it said, “‘I miss you so much my heart hurts. I'm sick from wanting you, and I'm counting the days—' What the fuck?” I looked at Pam. She gave me a weird, smirky smile. “‘Counting the days till I see your beautiful feet again.'”

“Face,” Pam said, adding, “idiot.”

“‘I can still feel your soft body against mine. I'll never forget that night at the Forest when we were so close, and I could smell your skin against my skin. We were so warm together.' Woo-hoo.” I waved the letter in the air like I was cooling it.

“Interesting, right?”

“‘When it rains, I feel your arms around me and smell the rainy scent of your hair.' Kind of personal, isn't it?”

“Oh, it's personal. Keep going.”

“No, really, that's enough, I get it. Okay, so you found this letter.”

“Letters.” She opened a metal box and pointed like she was that chick on
Wheel of Fortune
. It was full of faded envelopes, all shapes and sizes. “Plural.”

“Mom had a collection of porno letters?”

“Love letters.” She smacked me on the arm. “There's a difference between porno and love.”

“And you would know this because—”

“Funny.”

“So our parents had a little passion in their relationship.”

She smiled a mysterious smile. “Did they?”

“I admit I'm surprised.”

“Notice anything weird about the letter?”

“Weird?”

“Look at the signature.”

I looked. No name, just the letter J. “Who the hell is J.?” The Asshole's name was Bill.

Her smile turned into an evil glint. “I have no idea.”

I looked at the envelope. No return address. “Maybe some of the other letters have a name on them.”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“What about the postmark?” I tried to make it out, but it was too smudged.

“They're from a lot of different towns. I checked them all. They seem to be from all over the country, but mostly Arizona.”

“Are they all like this?”

“Torrid? Pretty much.”

“Jeez.” I tried to take it all in. I was suddenly really tired, and it was hard to think straight. “So some guy was writing our mother love letters?”

“Apparently.”

“Maybe they're from Frank.”

“Yeah, Julie, maybe he signed them with a J. because his name was really Jank. Anyway, they're from way before she met him.” Mom and Frank had started dating when I was nine and got married the following year. Ricky was born not long after that. “Look at the date.” She handed me an envelope. The postmark was smudged, and it was hard to see the name of the town, but I could see the word “Arizona,” and I could just
about make out a date inside the little circle of the postmark. “Does this say 1975?”

She peered over my shoulder. “Looks like it.”

“But she was married to Dad then.”

“Correct.”

“Holy shit.” I put the envelope down. “She had an affair?”

“It sure looks that way.”

“Unbelievable.” I tried to wrap my mind around the idea of Mom having a lover. She was always a big, big girl, but she was very attractive, maybe because she had a lot of personality and could turn it on to charm people when she wanted. In old pictures she wore skintight hip-huggers, miniskirts, hot pants, platform shoes, in spite of her size, just daring anyone to tell her she shouldn't. When I was little, I thought she was as beautiful as a queen.

“I had to tell someone.” Pam didn't have to add that Ricky was too much of a basket case to handle it, Tim would find a way to use it against us, and Norma would just be Norma. When we were kids, Donny and I were a team and everyone else was on the outside, but since he had died, Pam and I had gotten to be the same way, and while I wouldn't say she could ever take his place, we had a clear understanding that it was us against the world, or at least against Norma and Tim.

“Wow,” I said. “Way to go, Mom, sticking it to Dad like that. God knows that bastard deserved it.” Somewhere she probably still had the snapshots she used in court when she had finally had enough. He smacked the hell out of Tim and Donny, too, when he could catch them. The girls were his princesses, so he never laid a hand on us, but we saw plenty of stuff we couldn't forget—at least, I couldn't. Our dad was a nice enough guy now that he had twenty years of sobriety, or so he claimed, and lived in Florida with his third wife. We saw him every so often and everyone acted like things were fine and had always been fine, except Tim, who had moved as far away as he
could get.

“I know, I felt the same way. I was glad that in all those years with him, she wasn't just totally miserable. She had someone special in her life.”

“Yeah.” I picked up another envelope and turned it over, feeling the smooth old paper. I tried to imagine who the writer could have been and how she met him. From the postmarks, you could see he traveled around—maybe he was a salesman, like my dad. My mind started working on something to do with the postmarks, but Pam interrupted me.

“Have you ever felt that way about anyone?”

“What way?”

“You know, like you're sick from wanting someone so bad.”

“Not exactly. I mean, a few guys have made me sick, but basically, no. You?”

“No. I mean, I really loved Philly.” She had married Phil right after law school and they broke up when he got a job in Cleveland and wanted her to go with him. She said there was no fucking way she would move to Cleveland, not even for him, and for a while they commuted, but that didn't work. To be honest, I thought he was boring, but when he finally dumped Pam for a woman in his firm, she was a mess and I felt bad for her. “And Gerald. He was fun.” Gerald was a bartender she dated on the rebound from Phil, and there had been lots more rebounds after that. “But nobody ever wrote me love letters. Not like these.” She fanned herself with a letter. “How about you?”