I opened the top one at the table. When I read the first line of what my grandmother had hidden in that desk all those years, I had to put it down, because it began: “Dearest Verna, it has been one year today and I am still too proud to mail this.”
There are forty-seven of them.
One a year, every year, on the eleventh of May, which is Verna Sipe’s birthday. Sealed. Stamped, most of them. Not one ever mailed.
Verna and my grandmother were girls together in the same town and shared a room at the nursing school in Wheeling and stood up in each other’s weddings. There are photographs of the two of them in every album in that house, all the way to about 1961, and then not one after.
The first letter explains what happened, and I have read it about thirty times, and I still cannot believe it was enough to cost two women forty-seven years.
It was a remark. At a christening. About a dress.
That’s all it was. One of them said a thing and the other one heard it wrong and they were both twenty-eight years old and neither of them would go first, and then a month went by, and then a year, and then it got too big to walk back.
The letters go on anyway. Verna, my Carol had her tonsils out. Verna, we buried Dad Tuesday. Verna, I saw you at the Kroger on Route 2 and I went down the other aisle and I have hated myself all week.
1994: “I am sixty-one years old and I am still writing to a woman I will not telephone. Somebody in this family had better be braver than me.”
Somebody in this family had better be braver than me.
She left me the desk. I don’t think that was an accident. I think she knew exactly which grandchild would take the drawers apart.
Verna Sipe is ninety-four years old and lives in an assisted place outside New Martinsville. She is sharp as a tack and mad about the food.
I drove out there in October with a shoebox of letters and no idea what I was going to say. I got about four words out and she said, “Is Loretta gone?”
She’d known. Somebody had told her in the spring.
Her daughter went and got a Whitman’s candy box out of her closet. Thirty-one letters, all addressed to my grandmother, none of them mailed.
Two women, four miles apart, for forty-seven years.
We read them over two afternoons, in order, alternating. Hers, then Loretta’s, then hers.
She kept the whole stack. I told her they were hers and she said she knew that.
I call her on Sundays now. She is not my grandmother and she is not not my grandmother, and she tells me stories about a nineteen-year-old girl in Wheeling that nobody alive has ever told me.