Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

Everett’s letter

The mail came Wednesday. Among the cards and the envelopes was one with a shaky hand on the front, addressed to Josie in blue ballpoint, and a twenty-dollar bill folded inside a sheet of lined notebook paper.

She read it at the mailbox, standing in the wind with the other envelopes held against her chest. Then she handed it to me without a word.

Dear Miss Josie,

I am Everett Lindquist, class of 1960, Colome. I am eighty-four years old and I cannot drive anymore, so I am sending this by mail.

My own jacket burned in the shop fire in 1962. It was the only good thing I owned. I never bought another, because I thought it would not be the same, and I have been sorry about that for sixty years.

Marge called me and said what happened to yours. Do not let anyone tell you it was only a jacket. It was the first thing you ever earned. Get yourself a new one, and go give that speech. We will all be listening, even the ones who cannot be there.

Respectfully, Everett Lindquist.

I had to sit down on the culvert at the end of the lane. Josie sat beside me, and neither of us said anything for a good while, with the wind pulling at the corner of that notebook paper.

“Sixty years,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“He never got another one.”

“No.”

She took the paper back from me and folded it along its old creases, very carefully, and put it in the sandwich bag with the zipper pull and the scrap of gold.

“I’m going to give it to him,” she said. “The speech. I’m going to give it for him.”