Part 3 — Letters to Texas
Inez folded her hands on the tablecloth and smiled, the way she smiles when she has been waiting a long time for a question. The ham sat cooling between us. Howard held the last letter of his son in a hand that would not stay still, and I understood that I was about to learn, in front of everyone, what had been done to my family at the table of my own kitchen.
“I told him the truth,” Inez said. “Somebody had to. I told Nathan that his father had signed the papers.” Howard looked up. “What papers, Mother?” “The ones that took him out of this family. I told him you and Marcy agreed it was best, after the way he left. I told him you had said you no longer had a son.”
The room did not breathe. The sister of Howard began to cry quietly. I looked at the thin, steady face of Inez, and I saw that she was not ashamed. She believed she had done something righteous. She had told our son that his father had thrown him away, and she had told him that his mother had stood by and let it happen.
“I never said that,” Howard whispered. “I never said that in my life.” Inez shrugged. “You said you were hurt. You said you wished he had stayed. A mother knows what a man means.” My husband stared at her, and for the first time in thirty-four years, I watched him see his mother clearly.
That was when I took out my phone. I had made a decision on the bathroom floor, at two in the morning, with the letters spread around me like leaves. I did not want to fix this with words at a table. I wanted my son to hear his father. “Howard,” I said. “Call him. Right now.”
He dialed the number I had memorized from the last card we ever got from Texas. It rang four times. Everyone at the table could hear it. Then the voice of a young man, rough with sleep, said, “Hello?” and my husband said, “Nathan, it is Dad,” and could not say another word.
I will not tell you all that was said. I will tell you that Nathan did not speak for a long moment. Then he said, in a small, cracked voice, “Dad? Grandma said you did not want to hear from me.” Howard put his forehead down on the tablecloth, beside the ham. “She lied, son. Your mother and I have wanted to hear from you every day for two years. We never got one of your letters.”
Eleven letters lay on the table, and I read them to him one at a time, over the phone, across a thousand miles, while his father held the receiver between us. The last one I read twice. There was a long silence on the line. Then I heard my son laugh and cry at once, the sound he made when he was six and the thunder stopped.
Inez tried to leave, and the sister of Howard stood in front of the door. Howard asked his mother for the key, and she did not give it up at first, so he held out his open hand until she did. She dropped it in his palm like a coin. “I will change the locks tomorrow,” he said. “And on Monday I am taking you to your doctor, and to a lawyer, and we are going to talk about where you will live.”
The law is plain about what she did. Opening and keeping the post of another person is a federal offense, and a postal inspector would have been glad of the eleven envelopes. I thought about it on my knees that night, as I thought about everything. I did not call anyone. Nathan asked me not to. He said he wanted his grandmother alive and sorry, not in a courtroom. I agreed.
Later that night, after the dishes were done and the house was quiet, Howard and I sat on the back step with two cups of coffee. He said he did not know how a man lives thirty-four years beside a woman and never learns what she is carrying. I told him I had not known either. We were two people who had stopped checking the box, and a stranger with a key had been checking it for us.
A letter that reaches the right hand, even two years late, can still mend a house.
Inez moved into a small apartment at a senior living community across town, with a nurse on call and a front desk that sorted her post, not ours. Howard visits on Wednesdays. She speaks of Nathan now with a kind of puzzled care, as though a locked room inside her had been opened by someone else.
On the twenty-third of December a young man in a dress uniform came up our front walk with a duffel bag over his shoulder. I saw him through the kitchen window, and the dish towel fell out of my hands. I opened the door. He was thirty-one years old and he was six years old, and I held him on the porch in the cold until the neighbors started to cry.