The Letter Their Father Left Behind

The girls all three got into Tennessee Tech, over in Cookeville, forty minutes from home. All three. I do not know how I paid for it and I did pay for most of it, with the sewing and with the little bit Wade’s shop building finally sold for and with a church scholarship Earl Dyer quietly started and named after Carleen without telling me until it was done. The girls worked too, all three, waiting tables and shelving library books and one summer detasseling corn up in Kentucky. We did it. Four women and a town, we put three triplets through four years of college, and this past May they were set to walk across the stage all three on the same afternoon, and that is where the last part happens.

I have to back up two months to tell it right.

Wade had a mother, Nina Satterfield, the girls’ other grandmother, Patricia’s mother. Nina was a hard old woman who had never quite forgiven the world for taking her son, and she had kept her distance from us for years, I think because the sight of the girls hurt her too much. But she kept things. Nina kept everything. When she passed this past February, at ninety one, her house had to be emptied, and because Patricia did not want to be bothered with the sentimental end of it, the job of going through Nina’s keepsakes fell to the girls, her three granddaughters, who drove over on a Saturday to sort the boxes in that cold front room.

I was not there. I know what happened from the girls, after.

In a hatbox on the top shelf of Nina’s closet, under a wedding veil gone the color of weak tea, Josie found an envelope. It was soft with age and the flap had come unstuck years ago. On the front, in Wade’s handwriting, which the girls had never seen in their lives and which Hannah said made all three of them go quiet at once, it said one word. June.

It was a letter Wade had written to me. He had written it when the triplets were about three weeks old, in those first underwater months when I had moved into their house and nobody was sleeping. He had written it and, I think, meant to give it to me, and then life had come at him the way it does with newborns times three, and the letter had gotten tucked into something and lost, and somehow after the accident it had ended up in his mother’s things, in a hatbox, where it waited twenty two years for his daughters to find it. The girls read it in Nina’s cold front room. Then they did not tell me. For two months those three carried that letter around and did not tell me, which is the longest any of them has ever kept a secret in their lives, and I did not suspect a thing.