PART 2

The room kept buzzing around us. The caller yelled out N-37, and someone two tables down cheered, but the sound felt miles away.

My mother died in 1984. For forty years, I remembered her as a churchgoing woman who ironed my shirts and saved every clipping from my service overseas. The thought of her standing on Margaret’s porch, telling a lie like that, felt like someone had reached into my ribs and turned everything upside down.

“Margaret, that makes no sense,” I managed to say. My voice sounded thin, like dry paper. “Your sister Helen was twelve back then.”

“I know how old Helen was,” Margaret said softly. “And I was eighteen. Your mother came to our kitchen door two weeks after you left for basic training. She looked my mother in the eye and said you had gotten a girl in town pregnant before you shipped out. She said you married her by a justice of the peace to make it right, and that you asked your mother to tell me never to write you again.”

“No,” I said. “No. I wrote you fourteen letters from West Germany. Every single one came back marked refused. Fourteen envelopes, Margaret. I kept them in my footlocker until the day I got discharged.”

She looked at me across the bingo card. There was no anger in her face. Just that long, quiet sorrow of people who have carried a heavy crate across too many miles.

“My mother intercepted them at the mailbox,” Margaret said. “She gave them to me in a bundle, Robert. But she told me that reading them would only humiliate me. She said a boy who took another girl to the altar while whispering promises to me didn’t deserve an answer. So I wrote ‘return to sender’ on every single one. I never slit the paper. I sat at my vanity and cried until my eyes swelled shut, but I sent them back.”

Jenna nudged my elbow, holding up a yellow chip. “Pop, they called G-52. You’ve got that on your top line.”

“Not now, sweetheart,” I told her without looking away.

“Why are you here, Margaret?” I asked. “In this town? You moved to Illinois in sixty-four. That’s what the shop owner told me when I came home on leave.”

“My husband died three years ago,” she said. Her hands rested flat on the table, right next to the card with her handwriting. “His name was Arthur. He was a good man, Robert. We had forty-eight years together and three boys. When he passed, my oldest brought me back here to be close to his kids. I’ve lived three miles from your house for eighteen months.”

“Did you know Martha?” The question came out before I could stop it.

“I knew who she was,” Margaret answered gently. “I saw her at the grocery store over the years when I visited my folks. She was a pretty woman. She looked kind. I never bore you ill will, Robert. I just thought you made a choice, and that the choice wasn’t me.”

The caller announced I-21. Margaret picked up her purse.

“Don’t go,” I said, reaching halfway across the table before pulling my hand back. “Please.”

“My ride is waiting outside, Robert. My daughter-in-law picks me up at eight.” She nodded down at the bingo card sitting in front of me. “The number is there. Call it if you want to know what happened to the letters. Because I didn’t burn them when they came back the second time. Your mother kept them, and when she got sick before she passed, she gave them back to me.”

PART 3

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table with the bingo card propped against the salt shaker.

At eight o’clock the next morning, I dialed the number. She answered on the second ring.

“Come over,” she said. “I live on Elmwood. The duplex with the green shutters.”

I put on my Sunday shoes and drove over. Elmwood was five minutes away, right behind the old high school athletic field. When she opened the storm door, she had an apron tied around her waist and the kettle whistling on the stove.

She led me into a small front parlor. On the coffee table sat an old tin that once held holiday fruitcake. The red paint was scratched down to the bare metal along the corners.

She lifted the lid and set it aside. Inside lay fourteen blue airmail envelopes, tied together with a fraying piece of yellow parcel string. The edges were worn soft, and stamped in purple military ink across the front of each one was the word RETURN.

“Your mother came to see me in the nursing home in eighty-three,” Margaret said, pouring two mugs of tea. “She was eighty-one then. Same age we are right now. She had this tin in her lap under her cardigan.”

“What did she say to you?” I asked.

“She asked me for forgiveness,” Margaret said, sitting in the armchair opposite me. “She told me you were her only boy, Robert. Your father was already drinking hard by sixty-two, and she had it in her head that if you married me, you’d buy a farm out near the county line and never come back to take care of her. She said she knew Martha’s family. Martha’s father had money, and Martha had promised your mother she would build a house right on the back acre of your family’s lot.”

The room was dead quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator.

It was true. Martha and I had lived on that back acre for the first seven years of our marriage. We took care of my mother until her hips gave out. I had always thought Martha wanted to live there because it was cheaper, but Martha had made that deal with my mother before I even came home from the service.

“Did Martha know?” I asked. The tea sat untouched between my palms.

“Your mother swore Martha didn’t know anything about the letters,” Margaret said. “Martha just thought you and I were a summer thing that drifted apart when you shipped out. Your mother took the whole blame. She told me she kept the returned envelopes in her cedar chest for twenty years because she couldn’t bring herself to burn them. She gave them to me so I wouldn’t die thinking you had thrown me away.”

I reached into the tin and picked up the top envelope. The postmark read September 18, 1962.

The flap was still sealed with dried glue.

“You never opened them,” I whispered. “Even after she gave them to you.”

“They weren’t addressed to an old woman with grandchildren,” Margaret said, her blue eyes steady on mine. “They were addressed to an eighteen-year-old girl who didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t think it was my place to read a young boy’s heart forty years late.”

ENDING

I sat on that sofa for two hours. I didn’t open the envelopes either.

There was no point in reading eighteen-year-old words written by a boy who didn’t know what his life was going to look like. That boy didn’t know about Martha, or the way Martha used to hum hymns when she folded the laundry, or the night Jenna was born in the middle of a blizzard. That boy didn’t know that life gives you one path, and once you walk down it, the grass grows over the fork in the road behind you.

“Can I keep them?” I asked.

Margaret smiled, a small, tired smile that reached the corners of her eyes. “They have your name on the front, Robert. They always did.”

I took the tin home and set it in the bottom drawer of my bureau, right beneath my dress shirts and Martha’s small jewelry box. I didn’t feel angry at my mother anymore. You reach an age where being angry at the dead just takes more energy than your heart has left to give. She was selfish, and she was scared of being left alone in an empty house, exactly the way I had been sitting alone in mine.

Two days later, Jenna stopped by with a loaf of banana bread. She looked at the kitchen table, then looked at me.

“You look different, Pop,” she said, leaning against the counter. “You’re shaved.”

“I am,” I told her.

“You want to go back to bingo next Tuesday?”

I picked up the car keys from the hook by the door.

“No,” I said. “Next Tuesday, I’m taking Margaret out for ice cream on Lake Street.”