“…she wasn’t alone,” the man said. “Because of your sister, my wife wasn’t alone.” I brought him inside. He sat down at the end of our long table, still in his coat, and opened the shoebox. Inside were letters, a dozen of them, tied with a blue ribbon, and an old cassette recorder. “My wife, Margaret, couldn’t write anymore at the end,” he said. “Ruth wrote these for her. Every word, the way Margaret said it.”
He looked at Gwen. “My Margaret was a businesswoman in Denver for thirty years. She ran a recruiting firm. She said she hired a girl from a small town once, a girl with real fire, and she gave her her first job.” He paused. “Margaret came back here to die, where she grew up. And the hospice aide who sat with her every night turned out to be the sister of that girl.”
Gwen’s glass was trembling. The man pulled out the top letter and held it toward her. The envelope said, in my handwriting: To Gwen. From Margaret. “She asked Ruth to mail it,” he said. “Ruth told me she wanted to hand it to you herself one day. I guess she never found the right time. So I brought it.”
Gwen opened the letter with shaking hands and read it in silence. I knew what it said, because I wrote it. Margaret told her she was proud of her. She told her to call her sister more. And at the very end, Margaret said that the best thing she ever did in her career was hire a girl from my hometown, and the second best was meeting her sister at the end.
The man pressed play on the cassette. It was me, softly singing “It Is Well with My Soul,” and underneath it, very faint, Margaret’s breathing slowing down. Gwen put her face in her hands. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she got up, walked around the table, and held me like we were kids again. “I’m sorry, Ruthie,” she whispered. That night, she flew home coach, and she called me from the airport just to talk.
