The Letter in My Sock Drawer

The road to Ansonia

Saturday was clear and cold and the sky had that scrubbed look it gets in October in this part of Ohio, when every field is a different color of finished.

I told Wayne I was going. He didn’t offer to come, which was right, and he didn’t offer advice, which was wiser. When I started the Buick, he tapped the roof twice with his knuckles, the way he does when I leave on a long trip, and went back inside.

I drove west out of town on a road I used to know like my own hands. There was a new dollar store where the feed mill’s office had been. But the farms were the same. The soybeans were mostly off, the stubble lay pale gold in the long rows, and combines threw up dust on every other section. A man in a seed cap lifted two fingers from his steering wheel as I passed, the way they all do, whether they know you or not.

Her lane runs a quarter mile off a gravel road, between two fences, with a row of old maples along the left that were showing orange. Her mailbox is the same one. Black, dented, with the name Henschen in stick-on letters that had faded to the color of weak tea.

I stopped at the box.

I did not plan to. My foot just came off the gas. I sat there with the engine ticking and my purse on the seat beside me, and I thought: I could put it in.

That’s the shameful part. I had the envelope in my lap with the flag stamp already on it. I could have opened the little door, laid it inside, put the flag up, and driven home. After eleven years it would have been mailed, and I would have been, technically, a woman who had tried.

I put my hand on the window crank.

I looked up the lane. The house sat at the end of it, white, with the green shutters Don had painted every third spring, and the porch swing hanging still. Smoke came from the chimney, thin and straight. Somebody was home.

I took my hand off the crank. I put the car in gear.

I drove up the lane at about the speed of a funeral.

The porch

Don’s old pickup was parked beside the machine shed, same spot as ever. It was a Ford, a faded blue. The tires were low, and a skin of leaves had gathered on the hood. A truck that nobody had the heart to move.

There was a ramp now beside the porch steps, new plywood, still pale. I thought of the cane at the pears and felt something drop in my stomach.

I stopped the car. I turned off the engine.

I held the envelope in both hands, in my lap. My mouth was as dry as a feed sack. I could hear a dog barking somewhere far off, and the tick of the engine cooling, and my own breath.

I told myself I would count to ten and get out.

At about six, the curtain in the front window moved.

Just a little. An inch, maybe, at the edge, the way a curtain moves when somebody has been standing behind it for some time. Then it fell back into place, and the front door of the house opened.