The Wrong Number That Called Every Sunday

And then she said, “You have let me pretend for a year, Harlan, and I thank you for it. An old woman’s foolishness. But I suppose it is time I stopped.”

I told her no. I told her not to hang up. I told her I had something to tell her but I needed a day to be sure of it, and would she please, please call me again next Sunday, and she said she would.

I sat in that kitchen a long time after we hung up. The light moved across the floor. The barn cat came and went.

Here is what I knew, and what I had to be sure of before I said a word to that grieving woman.

When Nadine and I bought this farmhouse, forty years ago, we bought it from a widow. A kind, soft spoken widow in her sixties who was selling the family place and moving into town because it had gotten too big for one woman alone.

Her name was Pearl. Pearl Hollister.

I remembered her. Not well, not after forty years, but I remembered a good face and a firm handshake and the way she walked through the empty rooms touching the doorframes like she was saying goodbye to each one.

And I remembered this. Pearl Hollister and my Nadine became friends. More than friends. Pearl had no children, and Nadine’s own mother had passed young, and the two of them took to each other like family.

For twenty five years, until Pearl died, she came to Sunday dinner at this house once a month, at the very table where I was sitting. She watched our Denny grow up. She was there the Christmas he was born.

Pearl Hollister died fifteen years ago, in the spring, and my Nadine wept at that funeral harder than I had ever seen her weep, and Nadine was not a weeper.

I had forgotten, in my own grief, that this house had held somebody else’s whole life before it held ours. That the maple and the south fence and the gravel road had been a childhood before they were our marriage.

But I had never once known that Pearl had a sister. In twenty five years she never said the name Alma to me. Not once.

And yet.

I got up from that table, and I went into the back bedroom, and I pulled the cedar chest out from the foot of the closet, the one that held Nadine’s things, the things I had not been able to go through in three years.

I knelt down in front of it like a man kneels at an altar, and I opened it, and the smell of cedar and my wife’s hand lotion came up and nearly put me on the floor.

I did not know what I was looking for. I only knew that if Pearl Hollister had carried a secret sorrow, my Nadine would have known it, and my Nadine kept everything that mattered, and this chest was where she kept it.

I found it under the quilt Nadine’s grandmother made. A flat packet wrapped in a yellowed handkerchief and tied with a bit of blue ribbon.

Inside was a photograph and a letter.