"Sure," she said. "Go count."
"Love you, Mom. We'll see you Wednesday. I'll pick you up at seven, like we said."
"Like we said," Gussie agreed, and he hung up, and she sat looking at the phone.
Two weeks ago, Ramsay had come by on a Thursday evening with a rotisserie chicken from Kroger, which was what Ramsay brought when he had bad news, because Ramsay believed in his heart that bad news went down easier with a rotisserie chicken, and he had stood in this kitchen and told her that the trip had to slide. Just a few days. There was an audit at the company, he'd said, and they'd been through two rounds of layoffs since Christmas, and he could not be the guy who took the whole week off during the audit. Not this year. He'd gotten the rental lady to move it, he'd said. Wednesday to Wednesday. Same price. No harm done. She would ride down with him and Sunita and Zinnia on Wednesday morning, and Coralie would meet them there. It was all handled.
He had not looked at her while he said it. He had looked at the chicken.
And she had believed him, because it was entirely plausible, because she knew about the layoffs, because Sunita had told her in April about the nights Ramsay sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes after work before he could come inside. She had believed him because she loved him and because she had raised him to be the kind of man who would not lie to his mother about a rotisserie chicken.
She called Coralie. It went to voicemail on the first ring, which meant Coralie had looked at the screen and pushed the red button. Gussie did not leave a message.
She called Sunita, who was the most honest person in the family, a pharmacist at the CVS on Far Hills Avenue who had once driven back to the store at eleven at night because she thought she might have given a customer the wrong count of blood pressure pills, and who, Gussie knew, would rather swallow a bee than lie to her mother-in-law. Sunita did not pick up either. A minute later a text came through. Mom so sorry, can't talk right now, will call you tonight I promise. There was a heart at the end of it, and then, a few seconds later, another text, all by itself: I'm sorry.
That second text sat there on the screen. I'm sorry. Not for missing a call. For something larger.
Gussie set the phone down. She got up and went to the drawer by the stove, the one with the rubber bands and the twist ties and the takeout menus and the spare key to the shed, and she took out the letter.