I opened the top one at the table. When I read the first line of what my grandmother had hidden in that trunk all those years, I had to put it down, because it was addressed to a woman who is still alive.
Ines. It has been eleven years today and I am still not going to be the one who calls, and I am still writing this down, and I am still not going to mail it, and if that is not the whole trouble with the both of us then I do not know what is.
Ines Kowalchuk is my grandmother’s sister. She is ninety-four and she has lived eleven miles from that house, in Pulaski, since 1958.
Fifty-one letters. Not on any schedule. She wrote when something happened, and there are three in 1979 and none between 1988 and 1994.
They quit speaking in 1961 over something to do with their mother’s house, and I have not been able to get either version straight.
My mother never met her aunt. I never met her. We knew she existed the way you know a road exists in a county you do not drive in.
I drove those letters to Pulaski on a Saturday in March, and I was not sure it was mine to do and I did it anyway.
She read the top one standing in her own doorway.
Then she went in the house and came back out about four minutes later with a shoebox.
Forty-four. Sealed. Addressed to my grandmother, at that address, in that town, written between 1962 and 2019, and not one of them mailed.
Sixty-four years, eleven miles, two women in two houses writing letters to each other and putting them in the dark.
We spread all ninety-five out on Ines’s dining room table in date order. It took my cousin and me most of that afternoon.
Ines read the ones my grandmother wrote out loud, in order, over about four days, and my mother drove over for two of them. She got through every one and would not let anybody read them to her.
Then she made us open hers, the ones she wrote, and she sat there while somebody else read them out, because she said she was not able to hear her own.
They are nearly the same letter. Both of them say the other was stubborn, both say they were the one in the wrong, both say next year, and neither one ever got in a car.
Ines asked to be taken to the grave in April. She stood there about twenty minutes and she did not say anything out loud that we could hear.
She wrote one more that week. She let me read it, then sealed it, and it is buried at that headstone six inches down in a canning jar, which was her instruction and which we followed exactly.
She comes to my mother’s for Sunday dinner now. Twice a month, ninety-four years old, arguing about a house that got sold in 1963.
My grandmother called that trunk just old keepsakes. It was fifty-one attempts, and there were forty-four more of them eleven miles up the road, and the only thing either of those women ever lacked was somebody willing to carry the box.