Abby slid the sealed envelope across the table, the one in my sisters handwriting that said, For Gail, when she finally gets the butterfly. Larry set down his fork and asked why Joyce would want him there. Abby would not look at him. She just said, open it, Grandma. She said you would want to read it out loud.
I opened it. And the first line was about Larry.
Gail, my sister wrote, from the hospital, two weeks before the cancer took her. If you are reading this, you finally got our butterfly, and I am guessing Larry is sitting right there having something to say about it. So look at him, and then look at your wrist, and remember you were a butterfly before you were ever his wife.
I read it out loud, my voice breaking, the whole table silent. Joyce had watched Larry make me small for thirty years, she wrote. She had bitten her tongue at a hundred dinners like this one. And she had made our granddaughter Abby a keeper of the truth, a matching butterfly and a letter, so that on the day I finally did one brave thing for myself, I would hear my sisters voice telling me I was allowed.
Larry called the butterfly trashy, the way he had called a hundred things about me trashy. My dead sister reached across a year to remind me I had wings before I ever had him.
Mama called us her two little butterflies. Joyce and I always said we would get the tattoos together and never did, and then she was gone, and I got mine alone in an Asheville shop, crying the whole twenty minutes, for her.
And here was Abby, seventeen, with a matching one on her wrist, because Joyce told her to. Three generations of butterflies, and one man at the table who could not stand the sight of a single one of us flying.
I finished the letter. Then I folded it, put it in my pocket, and told Larry, calmly, in front of his whole family, that I was done making myself small for a man who was frightened of a tattoo the size of a dime.
I kept the butterfly. Abby and I get matching ones now, one for every year, for Joyce. Our mama was right. We were always butterflies. It just took my sisters last letter to remind me that butterflies are made to leave the branch.