I said her name and asked if she’d known a man in Fresno in 1983, and there was a silence long enough that I started apologizing, and then she said, Is he dead? Not who is this. Not how did you get this number. She’s eighty-one. She’d been waiting forty-two years for a stranger to call her with that specific piece of information.
Letter thirty-eight, written in 1994, says he’d found out she was married in 1985 and that everything he’d sent after that would have arrived in another man’s house and been a burden she hadn’t asked for. He wrote that he’d keep writing because he didn’t know how to stop, but that mailing them would be for him and not for her, and he wasn’t going to do that to her twice. One paragraph. He’d worked the whole thing out and then kept it up for another two years.
She married in ’85 because she thought he’d stopped writing. That’s what she told me on the phone, in a flat voice, sitting down somewhere. He’d gone quiet in ’84 for six months — the letters are in the box, one every three weeks, none of them mailed — and she’d taken the silence for an answer. Two people making decisions in the dark, four hundred miles apart, both of them acting on information that didn’t exist.
He died in 2019. She found that out from me, on a Tuesday, in her kitchen. I mailed her the box in March, insured, with a note saying I hadn’t paid for them and didn’t want anything, and she called when it arrived and said only that they’d come. In June she sent me a photograph: forty-one envelopes laid out on a table in date order, all still sealed. She said she’s opening one a month. She said she’s got three and a half years of him and she’s not going to rush it.
