The Letter Under the Barn Floor

Fifty-Nine Years at the Window

For a long time Lorraine did not reach for it. She sat with her hands pressed flat on her knees, staring at that single penciled word, Lorrie, the way a person stares at a photograph of someone who has died. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere down the hallway a television was playing a game show, the audience laughing at something.

“That’s Danny’s writing,” she said at last. Her voice was very quiet. “Nobody else in the world made an L like that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When?” She looked up. “When did he leave it?”

“It’s dated September 30, 1967.”

Lorraine closed her eyes. “The week he left,” she said. “I knew it. I knew he would have left something. I went out to the barn every day for a month after he was gone. Every single day, after milking, before school. I went out and I knelt down under Daddy’s saddle rack and I tried to pull up that board, and it was nailed shut. I thought maybe it had gotten stuck. I thought maybe Daddy had fixed the floor. I didn’t dare pry it up, because then he’d have known.” She pressed her lips together. “After a while I stopped going. I figured Danny had decided it was easier to just go. Boys did that. They went off to the Army and never looked back.”

She reached out finally and picked up the envelope. Her hands were shaking so badly that Marisol almost offered to open it for her, but Lorraine did it herself, carefully, the way she must have opened ten thousand envelopes in her life. She took out the outer sheet, the one in pencil, and unfolded it. The second sheet, still folded tightly in quarters, she set aside on her lap without looking at it.

She read Danny’s letter.

Marisol watched her read it. She had sat with people in hard moments before, mostly farmers’ widows watching their husbands’ barns come down board by board, but she had never seen anything like the way Lorraine’s face changed as her eyes moved down that page. She looked, for a few seconds, seventeen years old.

When she got to the part about the ring toss, she let out a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. When she got to the end, to I’ll come home, I promise you that part, she put the letter flat against her chest with both hands and bent forward over it, and cried.

Marisol did not try to stop her. She just sat there on the couch and waited, the way her father used to wait out storms in the cab of his truck, patient and quiet.

“General Delivery,” Lorraine said finally, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. “He wrote to me at the post office. He wrote to me, and I never knew to go.” She looked up, her eyes red and furious and grief-stricken all at once. “Mrs. Haldeman. She would have held them. Thirty days, that was the rule, and then they went back. He would have gotten them all back. Every one. Unopened.” Her voice cracked. “He would have thought I sent them back.”

“I think he probably did,” Marisol said gently.

“And then he came home in ’69, and I was engaged to Ray, and he saw me at the Fourth of July picnic and he just looked at me. He looked at me like I’d stabbed him. And then he was gone again. I never knew why. I thought he’d gotten cold over there. The war did that to a lot of boys.” She shook her head. “Fifty-nine years. I spent fifty-nine years thinking he left me without a word.”

“I spent fifty-nine years thinking he left me without a word.”

She looked down at the second paper, still folded, resting on her knee.

“What’s this one?” she asked. “It isn’t his. The paper’s wrong.”

Marisol had known this moment was coming since the night in the motel. She had rehearsed it. She had decided she would warn her, say something about how it might be hard, give her a chance to refuse.

But Lorraine was already turning it over, and the color drained from her face again, and Marisol saw that she did not need to say anything at all. Lorraine had recognized the handwriting on the outside before she even unfolded it.

“That’s Daddy’s,” she whispered.