"I can't read, Ro." He'd lifted his head off the wall. He said it to her straight, through the hole in the screen, through the cottage door, looking right at her. "I never could. Not really. Not like you. Signs, some. My name. The bus numbers. I can't read that letter from the state. I couldn't read that test. I sat down and the man gave me the paper and I looked at it and it was like looking at the bottom of the harbor. Everybody around me's writing. The kid next to me turns his page. And I'm sitting there with the pencil in my hand like a—" He stopped. "So I got up. And I went and sat in the bus shelter on the corner out there till one o'clock, so you wouldn't know. Then I came home."
My mother was holding the book against her chest. I could feel her shaking through her hand on my shoulder.
"Since when?" she said.
"Since always."
"Twenty years," my mother said. "Ted. We've been married eighteen years. I knew you two years before that."
"I know how long."
"You wrote me. When you were at Fort Dix. You wrote me letters."
"Chet Malinowski wrote you those letters," my father said. "Guy in my barracks. From Fells Point. I told him what to say and he wrote it down and I signed my name. I paid him in cigarettes. He was a pretty good writer, Chet." He almost smiled. "You liked those letters."
"I've still got those letters," my mother said. Her voice cracked in half. "I've got them in a shoebox in the closet, Ted. Tied in a ribbon."