…they were all in there. Every card from 1994, in one small box, and not one of them opened. Sealed envelopes, forty-some, the flaps still down. Mine was in the middle of the stack in my mother’s handwriting with my nineteen-year-old signature under hers, mashed at an angle because she made me do it over.
Underneath them was a Western Union telegram from March of that year, and that one had been opened.Her son. Twenty-two years old, in the Navy, and it happened in a harbor in Virginia in a way that had nothing to do with a war and everything to do with a wet ladder at two in the morning. She buried him in Beckley Hollow in April and then she did not open her mail for the rest of that year.
She didn’t throw it away, either. That’s the part I’ve thought about every single day since. She kept every card from the year she couldn’t stand to read one, and she kept them separate, and she kept them for seventeen more years.
I put the lid back on. Then I sat at my kitchen table and did the thing I’d wanted to do since I was nineteen years old, which was open my mother’s card and read what she wrote to a woman she barely knew.
It said: You don’t have to answer this.
I took the small box to the buyers and asked them to leave it in the house. They looked at me funny and said all right. It’s in the back bedroom closet on the shelf, and the woman who lives there now knows what it is, and she’s promised me it stays.
I still fill that box on Route 3. The seed company mails to it yet. Some habits are how you keep a promise nobody asked you for.
