The Letter in My Sock Drawer

The receiving line

In November of 2019 my brother-in-law died.

It was his heart, in the cab of the combine, with the last forty acres of corn left to cut. A neighbor saw the machine drift off the row and stop. Don Henschen was sixty-eight years old. He was the man who had come out onto the porch with a plate of ham.

Of course we went to the visitation. I put on my black dress and my good coat, and at the last second, standing in the bedroom, I took the letter out of the drawer and put it in my purse.

I didn’t tell Wayne. I imagined it, in a kind of fever: I would take her hand and say, “I have something for you,” and it would be done, in the middle of a funeral home, in front of the whole township.

When I got to the front of the line, I understood that I could not do it. Don lay in the casket twenty feet behind her in his good suit, with forty people at my back, and the cousins from Versailles watching us like a couple of stray cats.

Margie took my hand. Her fingers were cold.

“Thank you for coming, Arlene,” she said.

She said it in exactly the voice she had used on the man from the co-op ahead of me, kind and level and completely used up. She did use my name, and I have turned that over a thousand times.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

Your loss. Like I was reading it off a card.

I walked past the casket and touched the edge of it with two fingers and went out into the cold. In the car I opened my purse and looked at the envelope. It had a little crease across the flag now, from the strap.

I put it back in the drawer that night, under the winter socks. That was when I understood a thing I haven’t been able to unlearn. I wasn’t waiting for her to call anymore. I was waiting for a better moment, and there isn’t one. There’s only the drawer.

The pears

In September I saw her at the grocery.

It was a Wednesday morning, the slow hour, and I was in the produce aisle with a basket on my arm, deciding between two kinds of apples. I looked up, and there was my sister at the pears.

I knew her from the back, in a green quilted vest I’d have sworn she bought in 1998. Her hair, which she had colored a warm brown my whole life, had gone entirely white. She leaned on a plain aluminum cane with a gray rubber tip.

She turned her head. I know she saw me. She stopped, with her hand out over the pears, for about as long as it takes to say a short prayer.

Then she picked one up and turned it over, looking for bruises.

So I picked up a pear too.

We stood there, nine feet apart, two old women inspecting fruit as if our lives depended on it. She put hers back. I put mine back. She rolled her cart away toward the dairy, one wheel squeaking in a rhythm I knew, and I counted the squeaks until they were gone.

I told Wayne that night. He was quiet through the whole story.

“You didn’t say hello,” he said.

“She didn’t either.”

“No,” Wayne said. “I guess she didn’t.”