The Letter Under the Barn Floor

What Danny Kept

Marisol handed the phone across the coffee table and then stood up, because whatever was going to be said next did not belong to her. She went out onto the little balcony and slid the glass door closed behind her and stood with her hands on the cold metal railing, looking at the river.

Through the glass she could hear only the shape of Lorraine’s voice, not the words. At first it was hesitant, stopping and starting. Then it steadied. Then, after a few minutes, there was something Marisol did not expect at all. Lorraine laughed. A real laugh, startled out of her. Then she was crying again, and then laughing again, both at once, one hand pressed flat against her chest.

They talked for almost an hour.

When Lorraine finally tapped on the glass and Marisol came back in, the old woman was sitting with the phone in her lap and a tissue balled in her fist, her face blotchy and exhausted and somehow lighter.

“He kept them,” she said. “All eleven letters. In a shoebox. He’s going to send them to me.” She shook her head in wonder. “He married a nurse named Carol. They were together fifty-one years. He worked for the power company out there, climbing poles. Two kids, five grandkids. He said Carol knew all about me. He said she used to tease him about the ring toss.” Lorraine smiled, and it trembled at the edges. “He said he had a good life. He wanted me to know that. He said he was angry at me for about ten years and then he wasn’t, and then he just wondered.”

“And you?” Marisol asked. “Did you tell him about Ray?”

“I told him everything. Ray and the kids and the thirty-five years of fourth graders.” Lorraine dabbed at her eyes. “I told him I had a good life too. I did. I don’t want you to think this was some tragedy, honey. I loved Ray. I loved my life. I wouldn’t trade my children for anything in this world.” She paused. “But there was always a room in me with the door shut. Just one. And I never knew what was in it. Now I do.”

She looked down at the two letters on the coffee table.

“I read him Daddy’s letter,” she said. “I wasn’t going to. Then I thought, no. He deserves to know it wasn’t me. He deserves the truth as much as I do.” She was quiet. “Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I’d have been afraid of me too, Lorrie. I was nineteen and I didn’t have a dime and I was going to Vietnam. Your dad had already buried one boy from a war. I don’t blame him.’ And then he said, ‘I just wish he’d let you decide.’”

Marisol sat back down on the couch. For a moment neither of them spoke.

“He’s coming,” Lorraine said finally. “In the spring. His daughter is going to drive him. He wants to see the creek again.” She looked at Marisol with a sudden sharpness. “Will the barn still be standing in the spring?”

“No, ma’am,” Marisol said. “It’ll be down in three weeks.”

Lorraine nodded slowly, absorbing that. Then something seemed to occur to her.

“The tack room floor,” she said. “The boards from the post office. What’ll happen to them?”

Marisol had been thinking about that very thing since the motel room.

“They’re pine,” she said. “Old-growth longleaf. They’d make a nice bench, if a person had a mind to build one.”

Lorraine looked at her for a long moment. Then she reached across the coffee table and took Marisol’s rough, scarred carpenter’s hand in both of her small soft ones and held it.

“I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”