Siobhan Fennessy
Eamon got through it. I don't know how. His voice went at "Some days I did," and came back, and went again at "he's like his father," and he stopped there for a while and stood with the paper in his hands while the rain came in sideways through the open side of the shelter and spotted it, and then he went on, and he got to the end, and he read her name, and then he folded the letter back in thirds along the old creases and stood holding it.
Nobody said anything. I don't think any of us could have. Virgil Haberle sat on the bench under the lawyer's advertisement with his hands flat on his knees and his eyes closed and tears running down into the loose skin of his face, not making a sound, and my brother stood in front of him, and I sat on the far side of the armrest and cried in a way I had not cried since I was a little girl, without any shame at all, the way you cry when a thing has been closed up so long you forgot it was a door.
A bus came. It was the Number 10. It hissed to a stop at the curb and opened its doors with a sigh and the driver looked out at the three of us, a man in a suit holding a piece of paper and a soaked woman and an old man crying on the bench, and he waited about five seconds, and then he said, "You folks getting on?" and nobody answered him, and he shrugged and closed the doors and drove away.
It was Eamon who spoke first.
"She's right," he said. His voice was rough, scraped raw. "I won't write back." He looked down at the old man. "I want to be honest with you, Mr. Haberle. I don't forgive you. I don't know if I'm going to. I'm not my mother. I don't have her— whatever she had. I don't know if I ever will."
Virgil opened his eyes. "I know," he said. "I've never asked you to."
"I know you haven't." Eamon looked out at the street. Water was pouring along the gutter in a brown rope. "It would have been easier if you had."
He held out the letter. Virgil took it, with both hands, and this time his fingers closed on it on the first try, and he put it inside his coat, inside the brown car coat that was too big for him, in an inside pocket over his heart, the same place my brother had carried it for eleven months.
"Where do you live?" Eamon said.
Virgil blinked at him.