The envelope was cream-colored and heavier than it looked.
The woman at the gate desk held it out to me with both hands, the way you’d hand someone a gift. She was young, with a neat bun and a name tag that said JESSICA.
“Someone arranged for this to be delivered to you, Mrs. Wilson,” she said. “Before you board.”
“Who?”
“I’m afraid I only have instructions to give it to you.” She smiled. “And to tell you one thing.”
“What thing?”
She glanced down at a sticky note beside her keyboard and read it out carefully, like she didn’t want to get the words wrong.
“There’s something you still don’t know about this trip.”
I stood there with my carry-on bag strapped across my chest and my brand-new passport in my hand. Behind me, a toddler was crying. Somebody’s coffee smelled burnt.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was an old letter, folded in thirds. The paper had gone soft and yellow at the edges.
I recognized the handwriting before I read a single word.
The little loops on the L’s. The way the T’s were crossed too far to the right, like the pen was in a hurry to get somewhere.
My husband’s handwriting.
My husband, who had been dead for thirty-two years.
To understand why my knees almost gave out at Gate B14, you have to know a little about me. And about Richard.
So let me go back about four months, to a Friday afternoon in June, and a sheet cake.
I was sixty-eight when I finally retired after almost forty years of teaching elementary school.
Thirty-nine years, to be exact. Most of them in third grade at Lincoln Elementary in Dayton, Ohio. Room 12, at the end of the hall by the water fountain that never worked right.
I’d kept my maiden name, Wilson, when Richard and I got married. That was a bit of a scandal back then. His mother asked me at the wedding if I was “one of those women’s libbers.” I told her I just liked my name. After nearly forty years of teaching, it didn’t matter anymore anyway. Everyone in that part of Dayton simply knew me as Mrs. Wilson. Grown men with beards stopped me at the grocery store to say, “Mrs. Wilson! You taught me cursive!”
On my last day, the kids made me a banner out of construction paper. WE WILL MISS YOU MRS WILSON. The S in MISS was backwards. I didn’t fix it.
The other teachers threw me a little party in the teachers’ lounge. There was punch in a plastic bowl and a card everybody had signed. The principal, a nice young man named Mr. Okafor, gave a speech that made me cry into a paper napkin.
Then my daughter Emma walked in carrying a sheet cake.
It had blue frosting roses around the edges, and in the middle, in big swirly letters, it said:
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR FREEDOM!
“Freedom?” I laughed. “I still have thirty years of laundry waiting for me.”
“Then leave it, Mom,” Emma said. She set the cake down and kissed my cheek. “Do something you’ve always wanted.”
Everyone in the lounge said “Aww.”
I smiled and cut the cake and handed out pieces on paper plates.
But on the drive home, with the banner rolled up on the passenger seat, I kept thinking about what she’d said.
Do something you’ve always wanted.
And the problem was, I couldn’t think of anything.
I’d spent so long taking care of everyone else that I’d forgotten what I wanted.
My husband Richard died of a heart attack thirty-two years ago.
It happened on a Tuesday in March. He was in the driveway, scraping ice off the windshield of his Buick so he could drive to the airport for another work trip. I was inside packing Daniel’s lunch. I heard the scraper hit the ground.
I don’t remember much after that. I remember the ambulance lights on the snow. I remember Emma, who was twelve, standing in the doorway in her nightgown, holding her little brother’s hand. Daniel was nine. He kept asking, “Is Daddy going to the hospital? Is he going to be okay?”
He wasn’t.
He was thirty-eight years old.
Richard was my first love. We met in college, at a dance I didn’t want to go to. He stepped on my foot twice and apologized so many times that I finally laughed and said, “If you apologize one more time, I’m leaving.” He said, “Then I’ll just step on your foot again so you’ll stay.” We were married two years later.
After he died, there was a small life insurance policy, and the house, and me. That was it.
So I worked. I taught all day, and then I tutored kids after school, and in the summers I worked at a day camp and graded summer school papers at the kitchen table until midnight.
One night, Emma came downstairs at eleven o’clock and found me asleep with my cheek on a stack of spelling tests.
“Mom,” she said. “Why do you work so much?”
I sat up and wiped my face. There was a red ink smudge on my cheek. She laughed at it, but she didn’t look happy.
“Because I want you and Daniel to have everything you need, sweetheart.”
“And what about you?”
“I have you two,” I said. “That’s enough.”
She looked at me for a long time, the way only a twelve-year-old girl can look at you when she knows you’re not telling the whole truth.
Then she went back to bed.
I kept notebooks. I always had. Spiral ones from the drugstore, the kind with the cardboard covers that get soft at the corners. I wrote down things the kids said, funny things my students did, recipes, dreams I had at night, lists of places I wanted to go someday.
A few months after Richard died, I started writing letters to him in those notebooks.
Dear Richard, Daniel lost his first tooth at school today. He was so proud. He kept it in a little envelope and showed it to the mailman.
Dear Richard, the furnace broke. I called your brother. He said he’d come look at it, and then he didn’t come. I miss you most when things break.
Dear Richard, Emma got her driver’s license. She backed into the mailbox. I didn’t tell her you did the same thing when you were sixteen. I’m saving that for when she needs it.
One evening, Emma found me at the kitchen table writing.
“Who are you writing to, Mom?”
“Your dad, sweetheart.”
She frowned. “But he can’t read them.”
“I know,” I said. “But writing to him makes me feel like he’s still here.”
She didn’t say anything. She just put her hand on my shoulder for a second, and then she poured herself some milk and went upstairs.
I wrote to Richard for thirty-two years. I filled twenty-six notebooks. They’re in a cardboard box in my bedroom closet, labeled in black marker. RICHARD.
I never dated again. People tried to set me up. A widowed dentist from church. A gym teacher from another school. I went to dinner with the dentist once. He talked about his boat for an hour and a half. I went home and wrote Richard a very funny letter about it.
For thirty-two years, I believed I’d had a perfect love. Even if it had ended too soon.
I believed it the way you believe the sun will come up. 