Page 78 of Key West Homecoming

The cottage was never meant for Arthur.

It was your father’s, and then it was yours.

Which brings me to what I most want to say to you and what I have been sitting with for a long time before I picked up this pen.

I have loved you like a daughter since the day your father died. You were five years old and wearing a little blue dress Ruth had put you in that morning without knowing where the day would take you. At the funeral, you climbed into my lap and put your head against my chest. You didn’t cry because you were five and didn’t yet understand what had happened.

I held you and thought, this child is going to be my second chance.

You have been, Em. You have been that in every way I could have hoped.

I have watched you grow into a woman I am proud of every day, and your father would have been proud of you too. He would have been proud in the quiet way he did most things, and you got that from him. He would have loved that you built a life for yourself in a city he never got to see. He would have loved Priya, although I suspect the two of them would have teamed up against you whenever they thought you were working too much.

He would not have loved the seventy-hour weeks, and neither do I.

I’ll come back to that.

The cottage was your father’s before it was yours. He learned to walk on the porch. When he was seven, he carved his initials into the underside of the railing, and I never had them sanded off because they made me smile every time I saw them. They should still be there. Look on the underside of the railing on the east side of the porch, about a foot from the corner.

He loved that cottage, Em. If he had lived, he would have brought you down every summer of your childhood. I did the best I could in his place, and I know it wasn’t the same, but we had our summers, you and I.

They were something for me. I hope they were something for you too.

Now, about your work.

I’m not going to give you advice from beyond because your father would say that was undignified, but I am going to tell you what I see.

I have watched you make your life smaller so it would fit inside a job. I did the same thing after your grandfather died, so I know what it looks like from the inside. Work is safe when the rest of your life feels uncertain. You know what will be asked of you, and you know you can do it well. You can stay busy enough that no one asks how you are, including you.

Please don’t spend the rest of your life that way.

Come to the cottage. Sit on the porch. Grow something, even if you’re terrible at it. Learn the name of someone you don’t know yet. Have a laugh with a stranger and stay long enough to remember it afterward.

Your father would have hated to see you living the way you have been, and so do I. I love you too much to let this letter be my last chance to say it.

Edmund will bring you this letter if he is able, and if he isn’t, someone in his family will. I want you to know that he is a good man. He was the great surprise of my old age. He read to me almost every night for eight years, argued with me about books when he should have known better, and made me laugh in a way I had forgotten I could laugh.

If you meet him, please trust him. He was kind to me in ways I did not know I still needed.

I don’t know how to end this. I have been sitting at my own kitchen table for an hour trying to come up with a good last sentence, and I don’t have one.

I love you, Em. I love you the way I loved your father, and I love you the way I have loved almost nothing else on this earth.

Come to the cottage. Sit in my chair and look out at the herbs. Know that I was here, and that I loved you every day.

Grandma

Emma reached the bottom of the last page, but she couldn’t see the words anymore.

She pressed the heels of both hands against her eyes as something she had been holding inside for a very long time finally came apart.

She hadn’t cried when the nursing home called a year ago to tell her Gloria was gone. Emma had been sitting at her desk. She thanked the woman on the phone, put the receiver down and went to the ladies’ room, where she stood at the sink for a while before washing her hands and returning to work.

Two weeks later, she had helped Arthur choose flowers for the graveside service in Miami and decide what should be written on the small stone marker. She flew back to Chicago the next morning and was working on the Henderson deck the morning after that.

She had been dry-eyed through all of it. She hadn’t cried for Ruth in three years, not the way she needed to, and she hadn’t cried for her father in thirty.

Emma put her forehead on the table with Gloria’s pages beneath one hand and cried.