She said, “He dictates them. I’ve known since the second one.” A woman named Ruth on staff has been taking them down for four years — he talks, she writes, she signs his name because he can’t, and she mails them so the postmark looks the way a letter should. My daughter figured it out at seventeen from the handwriting and never said anything, to him or to me, because she understood faster than I did that the whole point was that he’d chosen to keep speaking to her at all. Sixty-one letters. She’s kept every one, and she’s kept Ruth’s secret too, and she looked at me across that box like I was the one who’d been slow.
Then she told me the part I hadn’t earned. The letters are about my husband — his son — as a boy. Things he can’t say to his own face anymore because of what happened between them in 2019, so he’s been putting them where they’ll survive him, in the hands of a nineteen-year-old who visits him twice a month and who he trusts to carry it. She’s been going alone since she got her license. I’d assumed she went with her father. She goes on Sundays and tells him about her classes and he tells her about 1974.
I met Ruth in September. Fifty-eight, worked there eleven years, does this for two other residents and would probably be told to stop if anyone official asked. She said the hardest part is that he corrects her punctuation. My husband still hasn’t read any of them and says he isn’t ready, and I’ve stopped pushing, because I’ve watched my daughter handle this better at nineteen than either of us has at fifty. What I did was ask her to keep the box. Not to give them to him. Just to hold them, until one of these two stubborn men runs out of time, and then to hand them over and let him find out what his father couldn’t say out loud.
