He looked at me with the expression of a man who has rehearsed this moment many times and has discovered, now that it is actually happening, that the rehearsal was inadequate. He looked like someone who was not sure whether I would slam the door or say something that could not be unsaid.
I did neither. I stood there while the recognition completed itself and something old and dormant stirred in my chest, something that was not yet identifiable as any single emotion but that was large.
“Hi, Sarah,” he said.
Fifteen years. And that was what he went with.
“You don’t get to say that,” I told him, “as if nothing happened.”
He nodded once, a single dip of the head that acknowledged the point without disputing it. Then, without trying to explain or apologize or ask to come in, he reached into his jacket and produced an envelope, sealed, slightly worn at the edges in the way of something that has been handled many times. He held it out.
“Not in front of them,” he said quietly.
I took the envelope. I looked at it and then at him and then at the door behind me, through which the ordinary sounds of my household continued undisturbed, the girls’ voices, the particular domestic murmur of people who are comfortable in a space and do not know that the space has just been entered by a complication.
“Girls,” I called, keeping my voice even, “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m just outside.”
One of them called back okay without pausing in whatever she was doing, and I stepped onto the porch and closed the door.
Edwin stayed where he was, hands in his pockets now, watching me open the envelope with the expression of a man in a courtroom waiting for a verdict that has already been decided and that he knows will be deserved.
The letter was dated fifteen years ago. This was the first thing I noticed, and my stomach turned at the sight of the date, because it meant this letter had been written and folded and carried and never sent, had traveled with him through whatever the fifteen years had been without ever arriving, had been opened and closed so many times that the folds were soft with it.
His handwriting was the handwriting I remembered, messy and slightly tilted, but this was not a hurried letter. The unevenness of it had the quality of deliberateness, of someone writing carefully through something difficult rather than quickly through something easy.
He wrote about Laura. Not about the grief of losing her, though that was present underneath everything else, but about what came after: the financial reality that had emerged in the weeks following her death, the debts and overdue accounts and decisions she had made without telling him, the complete picture of their finances that had been hidden from him and that he had discovered piece by piece in the days after the funeral. He wrote that he had tried to manage it, had believed initially that he could, and that each attempt to get ahead had been followed by another revelation, another account, another liability, and that the accumulation of it had produced a particular species of panic, the panic of a person drowning who keeps reaching for things that turn out not to be solid.
