The Letter in My Sock Drawer

“Well. I’m the one she asked for.”

The kitchen went still. Tammy stopped with the rolls halfway out of the oven. Somebody’s fork touched a plate and the sound went through the room like a gunshot.

Margie set down her spoon.

She was not angry. That’s what I remember. If she had been angry, I could have been angry back and it would have burned itself out by the pie. She looked at me with a face I couldn’t read, very level and very tired.

“Then you should have been here when she asked,” she said.

“I was here every Sunday.”

“Sundays,” my sister said.

That was all. One word. She said it quietly, and she turned back to the ham.

I picked up the casserole, with its wrong onions, and walked out through the mudroom and across the yard to the car. My hands were shaking so badly I rattled the lid. Behind me I heard Jill say “Mom?” and Wayne say something low to her, and then the screen door.

It was Don who came out. Big, quiet, sixty-four years old, in his church shirt, with a plate of ham and potatoes covered in foil.

“Arlene,” he said. “Take this. She doesn’t mean it.”

“She meant it,” I said.

“She meant something,” Don said. “I don’t know that it was that.”

I would not take the plate. I got in the car and Wayne drove, because I couldn’t, and Don stood in the yard with the foil catching the afternoon light until we turned onto the road. I can still see him there holding it, a man with a dinner nobody would eat.

Four pages at one in the morning

I wrote the letter that night.

I sat at our kitchen table in Piqua in my robe, after Wayne had gone up, with a legal pad and a blue ballpoint, and I wrote until my wrist cramped. Four pages, front and back. At about midnight I stopped being angry, quite suddenly, like a car running out of gas, and the rest came out gentler than the start.

When I finished, I addressed the envelope and put on the flag stamp. I wanted it to be ready. I wanted it to be so ready that there was nothing to do in the morning but walk it to the box.

In the morning I stood in the front hall in my coat with the envelope in my hand and thought: she’s the older one. She’ll call.

It was a thought with a lot of mileage in it. She’s the older one. She’s the one who said Sundays. She started it. If I mail this now, it says I think I started it. And I didn’t. Did I?

I put the letter on the hall table. By supper it was in the drawer.

She didn’t call that night, or that week. Mother’s Day came and went with no word from either of us. In June I wrote her a card and tore it up. In July, Jill mentioned that Aunt Margie hadn’t been to the county fair. I said, hand me the salt.

I know now that my sister was doing the same arithmetic in her kitchen forty-five minutes away. I did not know it then. I thought I was the only one holding the phone.

The Christmas cards came for two years, hers with Don and Margie printed inside and no note, mine the same, Wayne and Arlene and nothing else. In 2017 I sent mine and none came back. I told myself that was cleaner.

Wayne retired in 2018, and we sold the house in Piqua and moved back to Darke County. I told everyone it was for the grandkids and the cost of living. All true. But I picked Greenville out of a hundred towns, and some part of me did it so that I would be eight miles from my sister.

Eight miles, and eight years, and I did not drive that road once.