The Letter in My Sock Drawer
The letter had been in my sock drawer so long that the folds had gone soft as cloth.
I found it again on a Thursday in October. I was digging for a pair of wool socks because the first hard frost had come in the night, and the windows of our house in Greenville were gray with it. The envelope lay under the winter socks, where it had lain for eleven years and six months, give or take three moves. I knew the count without doing any arithmetic. I always knew the count.
Her name was on the front in my blue ballpoint. Margie. Just that, no last name, the way you address someone who has never needed one. There was a stamp in the corner, a flag, one I had stuck on at one in the morning in April of 2015 so I couldn’t tell myself in the daylight that I had run out.
I had not run out. I had run short of something else.
Wayne was at the kitchen table in his stocking feet with the Daily Advocate folded to the obituaries, the way he reads it, like a man checking the weather for people he knows. He looked up when I came in holding the envelope against my chest.
“That thing’s moved three times,” he said.
It had gone from Piqua to a rented apartment to the dresser here, each time folded into the same pair of socks.
“I know,” I said.
“Arlene.” He took off his glasses. He is not a man who makes speeches, and I could see him deciding to make one anyway. “Mail it or burn it. But quit moving it.”
“It’s eleven years old. It says things that aren’t true anymore.”
“Then take it to her.”
“She’d shut the door.”
“Maybe,” Wayne said. “You don’t know that. You’ve never found out.”
He put his glasses back on and went back to the dead, and I stood in my own kitchen with my heart going like I was twenty outside the principal’s office. I am sixty-seven years old. I spent thirty-one years in the front office of an elementary school, and I have talked down screaming fathers and one very determined goose. I could not carry a piece of paper eight miles.
That is the whole shame of it, and I would like to say it plainly at the start. Nothing terrible happened between my sister and me. Nobody stole anything. Nobody had an affair or a lawsuit or a bad word about a husband. We lost eleven years over a pan of green beans, and the worst part is that I can still tell you exactly how the pan looked.