The Letter My Grandfather Read
He reached into the inside pocket of the gray suit and brought out an envelope.
Plain white, soft and gone gray at the corners, the way paper goes when it has been carried and put away and taken out again. The front said one word, in pencil, in handwriting I would have known anywhere.
Bree.
My mother’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.
“Your grandmother wrote this,” my grandfather said. “At our kitchen table, in March, eleven years ago, about three weeks before she died. She was too weak to sit up straight, and I propped her with pillows and held the pad. She told me to read it on the day Bree stood somewhere nobody could take away from her, with people around her who had chosen to be there. She didn’t say a wedding. But I knew.”
He turned the envelope over. His hands were shaking, and he didn’t hide it.
“I should have read it years ago. The truth is I was afraid of the sound my daughter would make.” He did not look at my mother. His voice did not rise. “I’ve been a coward about this a long while. I don’t intend to die one.”
“Dad,” my mother said. It was barely a whisper. “Not here.”
“She said to read it from the top,” my grandfather said gently. “And not to skip a line.”
There were three pages, torn from the order pad he used to keep by the register, with Hollander’s Market printed across the top. They were covered in pencil, close and slanted and tired, and as he unfolded them a corner of the first page fluttered in the breeze from the open doors.
My grandfather put on his glasses. He cleared his throat.
And he began.
“Bree, honey,
Your grandfather is going to read you this when you have somebody standing next to you, and if that’s today, then I’m glad, and I’m sorry it took so long. I am no good at saying hard things out loud. I have always been better with a pencil.
I want to tell you what I saw, because I think you may have wondered whether you imagined it. You did not imagine it.
When your sister was four, your mother set her up on the counter at the market and told Gus she was going to college someday, and the whole store clapped. When you were four, your mother was proud that you had learned to tie your shoes. She said it kindly. But it was a different kind of proud, and you heard it, the way children do. I watched you hear it.
When your sister got a new coat, you got the old one. You wore it two winters, too long in the sleeve, and never complained, and every Sunday I watched you check your mother’s face to see whether she had noticed you in it. She had not. I want you to know that I did.
I tried once. I said it to Paulette at my own kitchen table, as gently as I knew how, and she did not speak to me for three weeks. I chose the three weeks over you. I chose being comfortable. That is my sin, and I am writing it down so it is not only God who knows it.
So here is what I want you to hear plain. It was never you.