It was on a single sheet of lined yellow paper, folded in thirds, and it had come in the first week of January in an envelope with a return address in Asheville, North Carolina. She had stood at the mailbox with it in her hand for a long time that day, long enough that the mail carrier, a young man named Hartley who wore shorts in all weather, had come back around the block and asked if she was all right.
Gus, the letter said.
Nobody had called her Gus in twenty-six years.
Gus, I will keep this short because I know you would prefer it short. I am not well. It is my kidneys, and it has been my kidneys for a while, and now it is mostly my kidneys. I do dialysis at home, overnight, with a machine that sounds like a dishwasher that is thinking about something. The doctors here say a year, maybe two if I behave, and they say it in the tone of men who do not expect me to behave. I am not writing to ask you for anything. I am writing because I have spent a long time thinking about what I would want to have said, and I did not want to be the kind of man who left it unsaid because he was afraid of how it would be received. I was that kind of man for most of our marriage and you deserved better. I have not told the kids. I will. I wanted you to hear it first, from me, and not from them, because I know how that would feel, and I have made you feel enough things you did not choose. You do not have to write back. L.
She had not written back. She had put the letter in the drawer with the twist ties, and she had taken it out perhaps forty times since, and she had not written back, because she did not know what to say to a man who had left her for a woman named Gaylene in 2000 and then left Gaylene for nobody at all in 2004 and then spent the next twenty years sending the children birthday checks for exactly fifty dollars, never forty-nine, never fifty-one, like a man paying a fine.
What she had done instead was book for six.
She had not said to herself that that was what she was doing. She had said to herself that it was a big house and it was nice to have a spare bed in case Coralie's knees acted up on the pullout. She had said it was the same price for five or six. She had said many things. But at night, lying in bed, she had let herself picture it: a phone call, in April or May, when she had worked up to it. Lysander, it's Gus. The kids and I are going to the beach in June. Hatteras. It's four hours from you. There's a bed.
She had never made the call. April had come and gone and May had come and gone and every time she picked up the phone, she had thought about Gaylene, and the fifty-dollar checks, and the Christmas of 2001, when Coralie, fifteen, had sat at this very table and waited for a father who said he would come by at two and who had not come by at all, and she had put the phone down again.