Chloe had been after me for three solid months about getting out of the house, and honestly, the silence in my kitchen had started to feel a bit too loud by the time Tuesday rolled around. Martha had been gone for seven years now, and while the quiet used to be something you could settle into like an old cardigan, lately it just felt like a draft coming under a poorly hung door.
My granddaughter is twenty-four, all sharp angles and restless energy, and she runs that little hybrid car of hers like she is trying to outrun a tornado. She came over right around five in the evening, banging on the screen door three times the way she always does, and before I could even tell her my knees were acting up from the damp weather, she had my windbreaker off the hook in the hallway and shoved it into my arms. Five dollars for a pack of cards, she told me, patting my shoulder like I was a ten-year-old boy heading off to my first day of school. Just five dollars, Pop, and you get out from behind that television set before you start talking to the refrigerator again. I let her drive us down to the community center behind the fire station because arguing with Chloe is about as useful as arguing with the tide, and besides, my Buick had a slow leak in the left front tire that I hadn’t gotten around to fixing.
The basement hall of the center smelled the way public buildings always smell, a heavy mix of cheap lemon floor wax, wet wool from people shaking off the evening drizzle, and the faint, greasy scent of burnt coffee coming from the urn by the folding doors. There must have been sixty people crammed into the place, mostly widows and widowers sitting at long folding tables with grease-penciled cards and good-luck charms lined up like tiny tin soldiers. Chloe steered me toward a corner table where an old fellow named Arthur was already busy sorting his bingo markers into little plastic piles, but Arthur was deaf in one ear and spent the whole evening complaining about the draft from the emergency exit, so I didn’t stay put for long. When Arthur went off to use the restroom during the fifteen-minute break between games, I gathered my blue markers and my cardboard squares and shuffled over to an empty seat on the opposite side of the room near the radiator.
I didn’t want to talk to anybody, and I certainly didn’t expect the evening to turn into anything more than a way to keep Chloe off my back for a couple of hours. I just sat down, wiped my glasses with the corner of my checkered handkerchief, and stared at the red plastic chips sitting in my palm.
The woman sitting across the table from me was busy sliding a yellow plastic marker over the number forty-four with a steady, practiced motion. She had her white hair pinned back in a neat twist that looked like it belonged in a different decade, and she wore a plain navy cardigan buttoned all the way to the top despite the room being stifling hot from the furnace. I didn’t look at her face right away because you learn at my age that staring at strangers in public places is just a good way to invite trouble, but then she reached out to straighten her pile of markers and her cuff pulled back just enough to show a small silver charm bracelet on her wrist.
It was an old thing, tarnished dark around the links, with a little enamel ice cream cone hanging off the tiny clasp by a thread of silver wire. My thumb went cold right inside my pocket. I looked up from my cards, and the breath just left my chest like I had stepped out into a January gale without my coat. The blue of her eyes hadn’t faded an inch, even after sixty-three years of looking at other rooms and other walls and other people’s lives. It was Margaret, sitting right there under the hum of the fluorescent tubes between a woman eating peppermints and a man snoring softly into his sweater.
Nobody said anything for a second, and honestly that felt worse than if the whole room had started shouting. Margaret stopped moving her markers, her hand hovering right over the cardboard like she had been touched by a live wire, and her mouth parted just a fraction before she closed it again. Sixty-three years is a long time to keep someone tucked away in the back of your mind where the dust doesn’t reach, but some things don’t need dusting off because they never really stopped breathing in the dark. My throat felt like it had been stuffed with dry grass, and I couldn’t find my tongue to say her name or even to ask her how she happened to be sitting in a municipal basement twelve miles from the county line where we both grew up. She was the one who broke the silence, her voice lower than it used to be back by the storefronts on Lake Street, but still carrying that little hitch at the end of her sentences that always made you lean in to catch the rest.
Hello, Robert.
I couldn’t speak. I just sat there staring at her across the scuffed green laminate table while the lady next to us yelled out about a missed number in the third column.
Margaret?
That was all I could get out, just her name, like I was checking to make sure she hadn’t turned into smoke the minute I looked her in the eye. She didn’t smile, but her shoulders dropped about two inches, and then she reached down and picked up her winning card. She didn’t flip it over with any kind of drama; she just slid it across the table toward my side with two fingers, right past my red plastic chips. On the back of that card, written in the same sharp, sloping handwriting I used to trace with the tip of my pencil during study hall in the spring of 1962, was my own telephone number from the house on Elm Street, followed by a series of numbers that hadn’t been dialed since the Johnson administration. And right beneath the digits was a single sentence written with a blue ballpoint pen that hadn’t been there when the game started. I never opened your letters because your mother told me you married my…
The caller up on the stage shouted out seventy-two, and somebody three tables down banged a wooden counter against the table in victory, but the sound didn’t reach the inside of my head. I looked from the handwriting on the cardboard to Margaret’s face, and then down at her wrist where that little silver ice cream cone was catching the glare of the overhead light. My mind went back to the summer after high school, that long, hot stretch of July when the asphalt on Lake Street was so soft it stuck to the soles of our sneakers like black taffy. We used to sit on the low stone wall behind the dairy bar after closing time, sharing a single paper cup of vanilla with chocolate sprinkles because neither one of us had more than thirty-five cents to our names. Margaret worked the counter from four to ten every night except Sunday, wearing that white paper hat that always sat a little crooked on her dark curls, and I used to walk three miles out of my way just to lean against the screen door and watch her scoop the tubs until my shift at the lumberyard started at dawn.
We thought we had all the time in the world, right up until the day my draft notice arrived in a brown envelope with my name typed out in crooked capital letters.
The last night we saw each other before I caught the greyhound bus down to Fort Leonard Wood was humid enough to make your shirt stick to your spine. We stood by the old weeping willow at the edge of the park down by the river, and Margaret was crying so hard she couldn’t even talk, so she just kept her forehead pressed against my collarbone while I told her I would write every single day until my boots hit foreign soil. And I did. I sat on my cot in the barracks with a yellow legal pad and a cheap ballpoint pen that leaked black ink all over my fingers, writing fourteen long letters about the red dust of Missouri and how much the chow tasted like boiled cardboard. I walked down to the post office tent every time we got liberty, dropping those envelopes into the slot with her name and her parents’ address on Lake Street written out as neat as I could manage.
Two weeks before my unit shipped out, every single one of those fourteen letters came back to me in a bundle tied with a dirty piece of twine, each envelope stamped across the front in purple ink with the word RETURNED written by some clerk who didn’t care about the boy who sent them. I figured she had found someone else before my boots even hit the train, someone who stayed behind where it was safe and dry, and I put the whole business in a box at the back of my mind and tried to be a good husband to Martha when I came home two years later.
I folded the bingo card in half, right through the middle of the ink, and slipped it into the breast pocket of my windbreaker where my fountain pen usually lived. Chloe came walking over just then with her car keys swinging from her finger, looking around the basement like she was inspecting a cattle auction to make sure I hadn’t caused any trouble. Pop, she said, leaning down so her breath smelled like peppermint gum, you ready to head back? Arthur’s about to start complaining about the heat again and I have an early shift at the clinic tomorrow morning. I stood up slow because my left hip was beginning to throb the way it always does when I sit on those hard metal folding chairs for more than an hour. I looked across the table, but Margaret was already packing her markers into a little canvas coin purse, her head down so the white hair hid her face from the glare of the bulbs.
I didn’t say goodbye out loud because there wasn’t a way to say it that wouldn’t sound like a lie in front of my own granddaughter, but I caught her eye one last time before I turned toward the exit. She gave me the smallest nod, just a fraction of an inch, like she was agreeing to meet me somewhere down the road when the light changed.
The ride home in Chloe’s car was mostly quiet except for the local news station playing softly on the radio about some bridge repair down on the interstate. I kept my hand inside my windbreaker, my fingers resting against the folded piece of cardboard against my chest, feeling the hard crease where I had doubled it over. When Chloe pulled the car into my driveway and killed the engine, she looked over at me in the dim light of the dashboard and asked if I had a good time down there at the tables. It was fine, Chloe, I told her, reaching for the door handle and pushing it open against the damp night air. It was real interesting. She walked me up the porch steps and waited while I got my key into the deadbolt, giving me that little granddaughter peck on the cheek before she ran back down to her car and spun out into the gravel with a spray of small stones.
I went inside and turned on the single lamp by the horsehair armchair in the front parlor, the one Martha used to keep her knitting needles in before her hands started giving out on her. I didn’t take off my coat right away. I just sat down in the dark and pulled that bingo card out of my pocket, smoothing the crease out against my knee with the palm of my hand.
The phone on the kitchen wall has that old-fashioned rotary dial sound even though we switched to push-buttons back in ninety-one, and the cord has been stretched out so many times it hangs down like a pig’s tail. I stood there in the yellow circle of the stove light at eight-fifteen that night, looking at the number Margaret had written on the back of the card, and my hand was shaking so bad I had to set my glasses down on the counter twice before I could punch the digits. It rang three times before somebody picked up on the other end, and then there was that familiar rustle of a receiver being settled against a shoulder before I heard her breath on the line. Margaret, I said, and my voice sounded thin and old, nothing like the nineteen-year-old boy who used to wait for her by the ice cream shop door.
She didn’t ask who it was because people don’t make mistakes like that at our stage of life; she just stayed quiet for a long beat while the refrigerator motor hummed its steady, low tune in the corner of my kitchen. Robert, she said, and it sounded like she had been standing by that telephone for sixty-three years waiting for the bell to go off. Can you come over tomorrow morning around ten? I know where the old diner still stands down by the canal, the one with the orange vinyl booths that hasn’t changed its coffee since the Eisenhower administration.
I didn’t sleep much that night, tossing back and forth between the flannel sheets Martha had bought us for our thirtieth anniversary until the gray light of dawn started showing through the slats of the venetian blinds. I got up at five-thirty, the way I always do, shaved my face with the old safety razor I’ve used since the factory closed down, and put on my good wool trousers and the brown leather shoes that still pinch my little toes if I walk more than half a mile in them. The diner down by the canal was nearly empty when I pushed the heavy glass door open at nine-fifty, the bell above the lintel giving that high, brassy ping that hasn’t changed since I was a boy skipping school to fish for bluegills. Margaret was sitting in the corner booth right by the window where the morning sun was cutting through the grease on the glass, wearing a dark green coat and holding a white ceramic mug of black coffee between both hands.
I walked over across the worn checkerboard linoleum, my boots making a soft scuffing sound against the wax, and slid into the seat across from her without saying a word. The waitress, a sharp-eyed girl with a name tag that said Brenda and hair dyed the color of a copper penny, came over with a glass pot before I could even get my breath. Coffee, Robert? she asked, looking at me like she knew my name from somewhere else, maybe from the hardware store where I used to buy my nails. Just black, Brenda, I told her, keeping my eyes fixed on the rim of Margaret’s cup.
We didn’t talk about Martha right away, and we didn’t talk about the weather or the way the town had grown up around the old lumberyard until you couldn’t even see the river from the bypass. Margaret set her mug down on the formica table and reached into her large black leather handbag, pulling out a flat rectangular box made of cedar wood with the corners worn smooth from years of being handled in the dark. She placed it right between the ketchup bottle and the sugar shaker, its lid held shut with a little brass latch that didn’t have any key to turn it. That’s the box, Robert, she said, her voice steady now, though her fingers were working the edge of her napkin into a tight little ball. That’s the box your mother handed me through our screen door on a Tuesday morning in October of sixty-two, right after the postman had dropped off the mail with the town postmark on it.
My mother had been down in the laundry room scrubbing the sheets when Clara walked right into our kitchen without knocking, looking as stiff and severe as a schoolmarm with her black leather purse clutched in both hands like she was guarding the church treasury against thieves. Clara told my mother, and she made sure I was standing right there by the pantry so I wouldn’t miss a single word of it, that you had met some girl from a wealthy family down in Missouri while you were doing your basic training, and that the two of you had gone down to the courthouse and gotten married between maneuvers to secure your discharge papers. She told me you were too ashamed to write and tell me yourself, so she had taken it upon herself to bring my letters back to me before I made a fool of myself by waiting around for a boy who already belonged to another woman.
I sat there in that orange vinyl booth while the smell of fried bacon and burned toast drifted over from the kitchen grill, and my brain felt like it was trying to run backward through a swamp. My mother had been dead twenty-two years, buried out in the Methodist plot under a stone that says Clara May Vance, Faithful Servant and Beloved Mother, and I had spent my whole life thinking she was just a hard woman who didn’t care much for show or sentiment. I never knew she went to Lake Street. I never knew she walked up those three wooden steps to Margaret’s kitchen and looked her in the eye with a lie so clean and sharp it cut sixty-three years out of two people’s lives before we even had a chance to start them. Margaret opened the cedar box with a small click of the brass latch, and inside, laid out in three neat rows like dead soldiers, were fourteen envelopes with my own teenage handwriting on the front, the stamps still canceled with the purple ink of the army post office, and every single one of them sealed tight the way I left them on my cot in Missouri.
She didn’t open them even then; she just let her fingers rest on the top corner of the nearest envelope, right over my return address on Elm Street, like she was touching something she had no right to disturb. My mother didn’t just lie about some girl down south, Robert, Margaret said, looking up at me with those blue eyes that hadn’t changed since we sat behind the dairy bar. She lied because she knew who my mother’s brother was, the one who left town with the mortgage money back in forty-eight before you and I were even old enough to walk to the schoolhouse together. It was a family pride thing, the kind of grudge that people in this county used to hold onto like a mortgage deed until it rotted right out of their hands.
The rest of the sentence on the back of that bingo card didn’t need much explaining after she said that, because I remember my father talking about my uncle’s debts in the kitchen late at night when he thought I was asleep upstairs with my homework. My mother Clara had never forgiven that side of the family for the shame of it, and when she saw me walking Margaret home from the ice cream shop on Lake Street with my hand in her coat pocket, she decided the line stopped right there in her own kitchen. We sat across from each other in that diner booth for nearly two hours while the morning rush died down and Brenda came by twice to warm up our cups without us asking. We didn’t talk about making up for lost time because you can’t make up for sixty-three years of birthdays and winter mornings and quiet suppers eaten across an empty kitchen table.
I told her about Martha, because Martha deserved to be spoken of honestly in the light of day, and Margaret listened without any bitterness in her face, nodding like she understood that we had both lived real lives that weren’t mistakes even if they weren’t the ones we planned when we were eighteen. She told me about her brother’s children down in the valley and the little brick house she bought after her parents passed away, where she grew tomatoes in big plastic tubs on the back porch because the soil was too hard for a proper garden.
When we walked out of the diner together around noon, the sun was hitting the canal water just right, turning the surface into a sheet of hammered silver that made you squint if you looked too long. We didn’t hold hands because we were too old for that kind of foolishness on the public sidewalk, but we walked side by side down toward the corner where Lake Street used to run before they put in the municipal parking lot and the dry cleaners. The old ice cream shop was gone, replaced by a brick storefront that sold cellular phones and computer ink, but if you stood right by the curb where the old sycamore tree used to be, you could still smell the damp earth under the asphalt if you closed your eyes. Margaret had to get back for her noon television program with her niece, and I had to get home before Chloe came over to check on my blood pressure pills, so we stopped by the green park bench near the brick water tower where the pigeons were fighting over a crust of stale bread.
Two old mugs of black coffee sitting on a weathered wooden table by the lakeshore wouldn’t have looked right in this part of town, so we just stood there for a minute by the green painted slats of that bench while the autumn wind came up off the water and ruffled the edges of our coats. Robert, she said, turning her head just enough so I could see the lines around her eyes that weren’t there on the dairy bar steps. Come by on Thursday. I’ve still got a couple of those yellow legal pads from when we were kids, and we can sit on the porch if the weather holds. I told her I would be there at ten o’clock sharp, and then she turned and walked down toward the bus stop without looking back over her shoulder, her boots making a steady, dry clicking sound against the concrete.
I stood there for a long time watching her blue coat get smaller and smaller until she turned the corner by the library, and then I put my hands deep into my pockets, felt the hard square of that folded bingo card against my ribs, and started the long walk back to the house on Elm Street.
