The Letters

I should have called someone. I should have driven straight to Ingrid's or waited until morning with coffee in my hand and my thoughts arranged in some kind of order. Instead I sat on the floor of his study with the lamp pulled low and read.

The earliest letter was dated 1962. My grandfather would have been twenty-six. The handwriting was steadier then, less of the tremor that crept into his signature by the time I knew him, but the voice underneath it was exactly his — dry, a little formal, breaking into something raw when he forgot to guard it.

I think about the lake more than I should, one letter read. Not the water. The bench. You know the one.

Another, dated eight months later: You asked if I regret it and I won't lie to you in writing when I can't manage it out loud. Some days. Most days, if I'm honest, which I'm trying to be with you even when I can't be with anyone else.

There was no mistaking what I was reading. My grandfather — steady, unshakeable, the man who taught me to bait a hook and balance a checkbook in the same afternoon — had loved someone named Emory with a kind of ache I'd never once heard in his voice for my grandmother.

One letter was different from the rest. Shorter. The handwriting less even, like it had been written in a hurry, or in anger, or both.

After what happened Tuesday night I don't know what's safe to put on paper anymore. Things were said in that kitchen I can't take back and can't repeat to you. If it ever comes out — all of it — don't come to me. Go to Georgina. She'll know exactly what to do. She always has.

Tuesday night. A fight in a kitchen, decades before I was born, that had apparently mattered enough to change the shape of everything after it — and somehow Georgina, the housekeeper who'd just lied to my face about knowing anything at all, was the one person my grandfather trusted to handle the fallout.

I didn't sleep. At six in the morning I was standing outside her cottage door with the letter in my hand, waiting for the light to come on.