The Letter in My Sock Drawer
The last page
She turned the notebook over to the back, and let me see the last page she’d written.
The entries ran through the winter to the middle of January and then stopped. A gap of white paper. And then, at the bottom, in a different pen and a shakier hand, one more.
Easter, April 5. Arlene left with the casserole. I stood on the porch till her taillights were gone. Mom would be ashamed of both of us. Call her tomorrow.
And under that:
April 6. Didn’t.
April 7. Didn’t.
April 8.
There was no more. The page ran out of date, and ran out of notes, and after that were only the blank lines.
“I kept thinking tomorrow,” Margie said quietly. “Then Mother’s Day. Then it had been a year, and what do you say after a year? It gets heavier every day you wait. I wrote you a dozen starts in my head. I never wrote one down.”
“I wrote one down.”
“I know you did.” She looked at the envelope. “I’ve been looking at it since I sat down.”
I picked it up. My hand wasn’t steady. I laid it on the oilcloth between us, on top of the green notebook, the flag stamp crooked in the corner and the ink of her name gone a little pale.
“It’s out of date,” I said. “It says things that aren’t so anymore. I wrote a line at the bottom, but it’s still a letter from 2015.”
“Give it here,” Margie said.
She lifted the glasses that hung from a cord on her chest and put them on, and she opened the envelope with her thumb along the top, the way she always opened Christmas cards, and she read.
I watched her read. I couldn’t help it. I watched the small things happen to her face. At the line about the blanket, her chin moved. At the line about the hymns, she closed her eyes and opened them again. Two-thirds down the third page her mouth twitched, and I knew exactly where she was.
“I am not writing to say you were right about the onions,” Margie read aloud, in a flat voice. “Although you were.” She looked at me over the top of her glasses. “You wrote that at one in the morning.”
“I did.”
“You were still being smart.”
“I’m always smart.”
“You are not,” my sister said, “even slightly,” and then she went on reading.