I read it twice. I think about a woman in Tennessee who kept a shoebox in three different apartments for three decades because throwing it away felt wrong and she didn't know who to give it to. She knew, somewhere, that the right person would eventually come looking. She just waited.
James' letter has been in my nightstand drawer for three weeks.
I've read it four times. I know what it says. I've been waiting to know what I want to say back, and I think I know now, so I'm going to write it before I talk myself out of it.
I take the letter out and read it one more time standing at the dresser. His handwriting is neat, controlled, the handwriting of a man who thinks before he commits anything to paper. Four paragraphs. He doesn't explain himself again—he already did that in the garden. He says he hopes I'm writing. He says he thinks about the conversation at the café sometimes, the one where I told him who my mother was and he had to rearrange everything he thought he knew. He says he's glad I exist even though he knows that's a complicated thing to say to someone who has every reason to be angry at him.
Itiscomplicated. I've been sitting with that for three weeks.
I sit at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and an actual pen and I write four sentences.
I read your letter four times. I'm not ready to forgive you. But I'm not done with you either. I'll be in touch.
Every word is true and nothing in it is more than I mean. I fold it, seal it in an envelope, write his address on the front, and walk it to the mailbox at the end of the block before I can change my mind. The night air is cool. The street is quiet. I drop the envelope in and walk back and the whole thing takes four minutes but feels like considerably more.
Phoenix is in the living room when I get back, his legs stretched out on the couch. He looks up when I come in and reads my face.
"I wrote to James," I say. “I told him that we’re not done." I look at him. "I needed you to know."
He's quiet long enough that I can't read him. His book is still open in his hand, his thumb holding the page, his eyes on me.
"Good," he says.
One word. Not approval, not absolution. This is yours and I won't make it harder. He looks back down at his book and I go to the kitchen and pour a glass of water and drink half of it standing at the sink. The faucet drips once after I turn it off. The refrigerator hums. Outside a car passes on the road below and its headlights sweep briefly across the ceiling.
I go sit beside him on the couch.
He doesn't say anything. He just lifts his arm and I tuck myself under it and he goes back to his book. I stare at the ceiling as the night settles around us and that's enough.
Two weeks later I call Mom. I don’t want to fight or demand anything or make any point. I just want to talk, which is something we haven't done for a long time.
When she picks up on the second ring, she sounds surprised and tries not to show it. That’s very typical of her, but I let it go. We talk for forty minutes. We start with the weather and about some mundane things on the news before I tell her about my talk with James.
"When did that happen?" she asks.
"Thursday afternoon," I say. "He called and I almost didn't answer and then I did and we talked for an hour and when I hung up I sat down and wrote the last two pages." I pause. "It just came out."
Silence.
"You talked to James," she says.
"Yes."
"How was it?"
I think about peonies on a fire escape and about a laugh she never meant to have. "He told me things about you. Small things. Things I didn't know."
She doesn't say anything for a moment. I can hear her breathing. "What things?"
"The peonies.”
The silence on her end goes soft in a way her silences don't usually go.
"He remembered those.” Her voice is different. Not guarded, not smooth. Just different.
"He remembered one spring. Said it stuck with him." I lean against the kitchen counter, the tile cool through my shirt. "I remembered them too, once he said the word. Pink ones in terracotta pots on the fire escape. I just didn't know what they were called."
"Peonies," she says. "I grew them every year until you left for college. Then I stopped."
