I said yes. One word, and I’ve been living inside its consequences for five weeks. She asked me plainly, in my kitchen, twenty-nine years old and not a child, and I have spent three years being lied about at Thanksgiving and I did not have another no in me. Then she asked what it said and I told her that was the part I couldn’t do, and she said — reasonably, calmly — that a letter I won’t describe is worse than no letter at all, because now she knows her grandmother wrote something and that I decided her father shouldn’t have it.
She’s right. That’s what I’ve had to sit with. Burning it protected him from the content; admitting it exists exposes him to the fact of it, which may be the crueler half. He’ll know for the rest of his life that his mother put something down about him and that his sister read it and made a judgment. My mother wrote burn this because she was trying to give him a version of himself he could survive, and I’ve now handed him the outline of the thing without the thing, which is precisely what she was trying to prevent.
My niece has asked twice more. I keep saying the same sentence: it wasn’t about money, and it wasn’t confusion, and I’m not going to be the one who tells you. She said last week that she’s going to ask him herself — not about the letter, about 1998, about what he did — and I told her that was hers to do. I think she will. I think he’ll deny it, and I think she’ll believe him, and I think I’ll go on being the sister who took the house. What I can’t work out is whether I answered her because she deserved the truth or because after three years I finally wanted somebody in that family to look at him differently. Both are true. I only know which one my mother would have called it.
