And I dropped the whole business on the floor, because tucked into that shallow space, flat and careful, was a bundle of letters tied with a faded blue ribbon, and a single photograph laid on top.
The photo was two young people at a county fair, black and white, gone soft at the creases from being handled. A girl with her hair pinned up and a soldier in his dress uniform, the two of them laughing at something just off to the side, standing close the way people stand when they think nobody is watching. On the back, in pencil: Me and Raymond, Yuma fair, summer of 1951. The best day of my whole life.
I untied the ribbon with my hands not quite steady and read them right there on my spare-room floor. They were letters between a girl named Alma and that soldier, Raymond, written back and forth the year he shipped out to Korea. Young love, the real kind, all of it. Plans for a little house. Names they liked for children. The way he missed the smell of her hair. And then, near the bottom of the stack, the last one. Raymond wrote that he was not coming home to Yuma after all. His mother had taken sick back in Ohio, his daddy needed him on the farm, and he could not ask Alma to leave everything and follow him into a hard life he was not sure he could give her. He set her free, is what he did. Signed every last letter the same way, yours no matter what.
She married somebody else. Kept his letters sealed in the bottom of a dresser for seventy years, where a husband would never find them, and carried a whole other life on top of them, and not a soul ever knew.
I am a nosy woman by nature, and I could not let it lie. It took me the better part of a month and a lot of phone calls, but I found him. Raymond is ninety-four now, in a veterans home outside Dayton, Ohio. Sharp as a tack, the nurse told me, just lonesome. I mailed him that photograph and a note explaining how it came to me, and I held my breath.
He called me himself a week later, his voice thin and shaking. He told me he had thought about Alma every single day of his life. He never knew she kept the letters. He never knew she still had that picture from the fair. He said, and I will remember this until the day I die, that a man can spend seventy years believing he was forgotten and be wrong about it the whole time.
I gave that oak dresser a good coat of lemon oil and it sits in my front room now, and I would not sell it for a thousand dollars. Fifteen dollars at a yard sale. I thought I was hauling home a piece of furniture. What I hauled home was a love story two people carried in silence for seventy years, and one last chance to tell an old man he was loved all along.