The door of the little brick house in Macon opened before I could knock, and the woman standing in it was about thirty eight, tall and slender, in a nurse uniform with a hospital badge clipped to the pocket. She had the face of a young man. I knew it before she said a word, the set of the jaw, the dark, level eyes, the small crease between the brows that my son Marcus had worn all his life when he was thinking. Major Haynes stood behind me on the walk with his hat in his hands. The woman looked at him, then at me, and put her fingers over her mouth.
“Mrs. Pettiford,” she said. “I have written to you so many times.” She stepped back, and I walked into her living room, a clean, small room with a sofa, a bookcase, and on the wall a framed photograph of a young soldier in dress uniform, smiling. My son. I sat down on the couch because my legs would not hold me. Her name was Keisha Johnson. She was thirty eight. She told me she had met Marcus at a church picnic in Macon in the spring of 2005, when she was seventeen and he was home on leave. They had been together four months.
Keisha disappeared into a bedroom and came back with a shoebox, an old Nike box, tied shut with a green ribbon. She set it on my knees. “Open it,” she said. I lifted the lid, and I could not breathe. Inside, in neat rows, were envelopes. Dozens of them. Each addressed in a careful girlish hand to Mrs. Curtis Pettiford, Valdosta, Georgia. Each stamped with the same bold red letters across the front. RETURN TO SENDER. And on every one, in blue ink, a short line in handwriting I would have known anywhere. My husband. Curtis.
I turned over the first one with a hand that shook. Not at this address, Curtis had written. The second said the same. The third said, No such person. On the fourth, in a different color of ink, he had scrawled, Stop writing. There were thirty seven letters in that box, from 2006 to 2012, and every one had been sent back unopened. Beneath them, tucked in the lid, was a stack of photographs, a baby in a yellow blanket, a toddler on a swing, a small boy in a school uniform, each one pierced by a small pin and labeled on the back with the year.
Grief can make an honest man deaf to the one voice that might have healed him, and he carries that silence to his grave.
“I wrote to you in September of 2006,” Keisha said. Her voice was gentle and level, the voice of a woman who had practiced for years. “Marcus had died in August. I was eighteen, and I was pregnant. I did not know how else to reach you. I mailed the first letter with a photograph of the ultrasound. It came back. I wrote again when he was born. I wrote on every birthday. I wrote at Christmas. I sent the school picture, and the report card, and a drawing he made of an airplane. I told myself that you were too sad to answer. I kept writing for six years.”
I put the lid on the box and held it against my chest. I could see Curtis in my mind, at the kitchen table in 2006, in his undershirt, with an unopened letter in his hand and his face like a stone. He had lost his son in a war in a desert and had never spoken of it again. I realized, slowly, what must have happened. A girl he had never met, claiming a grandchild. Someone, he must have thought, who had read the paper and wanted the death benefit. He had decided to protect me from pain. He had decided wrong.
“Mrs. Pettiford, I am so sorry,” Keisha said. She had come to kneel beside me, and she looked up at my face with such tender concern that I could hardly bear it. “I never meant to cause you more hurt. After a while, I stopped writing. Then Marcus Junior turned eighteen, and he said he wanted to find you himself. He enlisted, and when he got leave, he went to the Waffle House where you went. He said he had heard it was a place where you sat on Tuesday nights. He had to see if you were real.”
I started to laugh, and then I was crying, in a way that came up from somewhere beneath the floor. I told her it was my son Marcus who used to love that Waffle House. I told her my husband had passed in the fall, and that I had been sitting at the counter ever since, because the house was too quiet. I told her that on the night before I met her boy, I had prayed, I did not know to whom, that the Lord would send me someone to feed. The Lord had a sense of humor.
Major Haynes, who had been standing silent in the doorway, wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. He said he had been a chaplain for twenty six years and had never seen anything like it. Then the front door opened again, and the young soldier I had met at the counter, Private Marcus Jerome Pettiford, walked in from the car in his fatigues. He stood at the end of the sofa, tall and uncertain, twisting his cap. I held out my arms. He fell into them, and I felt the broad, solid back of my son in the body of his boy.
We stayed there until dark. Keisha made fried chicken and corn bread, and the four of us ate at the little kitchen table under a calendar from the Baptist church. Marcus Junior told stories about the Army and his mother and the way he used to look at the photograph on the wall. He had the laugh of my husband, a slow rumble. I looked at his hands, and I saw the hands of Curtis, and the hands of my son, and I thought that nothing is ever lost. It only travels through other people until it finds its way back.
I moved to Macon the following spring, into a small yellow house three streets from Keisha. On Sundays we go to church together, and Marcus comes when he is on leave, and we sit in the third pew, the three of us, in a row. I keep the shoebox on the shelf in my bedroom. I have written a reply, at last, to each of the thirty seven letters, one by one, in blue ink. At the top of every page I wrote the same words. Dear Keisha. I am so sorry it took me so long to get home.