“You have no idea what we managed while you visited twice a week and went home.”
That landed because part of it was true.
I had brought groceries, read bedtime stories, and believed whatever explanation let me leave before May woke screaming.
My mother took the sixth envelope from my hand.
For a moment, I thought she would tear it.
Instead, she opened it carefully and read the first page standing up.
Her face changed before she reached the bottom.
Rachel had written that Dad’s gray sedan had passed the laundromat twice while she waited by the window.
She had hidden in the restroom until June locked the front door.
June had not imagined the car.
I looked at my father.
He adjusted the cuff of his jacket.
“You saw her.”
“I saw a green coat.”
“Last month?”
He did not answer.
My mother answered for him.
“He has been driving past that laundromat on Thursdays.”
“How long?”
“A few months.”
My father turned toward her so sharply that the keys in his pocket struck the parcel locker.
“You said you wanted certainty.”
“I wanted to know she was alive.”
“You knew.”
“I knew she had been alive two years ago.”
The difference mattered to her.
It did not matter to May.
She was holding the returned envelope now, tracing her grandfather’s handwriting without reading it aloud.
I took it from her and placed it back in the box.
Then I opened the final envelope.
It contained no letter, only a fresh loyalty card with one punch, a blue thread taped across machine nine, and a date written beneath it.
The date was tomorrow.
The time was four eighteen.
My mother stood beside me.
“She will not come if he is there.”
My father reached for the card.
I put it inside my shirt pocket.
“You are not coming.”
“You cannot take May into an arranged meeting with someone who abandoned her.”
May stepped away from him.
He noticed.
So did my mother.
At home that night, May refused dinner and sat on the kitchen floor while I unfolded and refolded the marked towel.
My parents argued behind their bedroom door in voices low enough to avoid individual words.
Every few minutes, the ice maker dropped a cube with a hard plastic crack.
I tried calling the number Rachel had written in the margin of the fifth letter.
It was disconnected.
The call achieved nothing.
May watched me set the phone down.
“Did Grandpa scare Mom?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did Grandma?”
I looked toward the closed bedroom door.
“Yes.”
May nodded as though she had been checking an answer she already possessed.
Before midnight, my mother came into the kitchen carrying all seven envelopes in a grocery bag.
She placed them on the table and said my father believed they should be destroyed before anyone misunderstood them.
“Did you stop him?”
“I brought them to you.”
“That is not what I asked.”
She sat across from me.
Her lipstick had worn away except at the corners of her mouth.
“I stopped him tonight.”
May had fallen asleep against my side with one sock half off.
My mother reached to fix it, but I moved May’s foot onto my lap.
“Tomorrow, you will tell Rachel what you did,” I said.
My mother stared at the grocery bag.
“What if she takes May and disappears again?”
“You do not get to use the result of your lie as proof that the lie was necessary.”
She flinched.
I handed her the newest letter.
“You will be at the laundromat, but you will wait outside unless Rachel asks for you.”
“And your father?”
“He stays here.”
At 4:03 the next afternoon, I parked behind the grocery store across from the laundromat so Rachel would not see my car beside my parents’ sedan.
May wore the purple hair clip and carried the towel rabbit by its folded body.
She had eaten half a banana in the car and left the stringy piece on the cup holder.
My mother waited near the newspaper box with her hands visible.
My father had promised to remain home.
At 4:11, his gray car turned onto the street.
My mother closed her eyes.
I did not.
He drove past once.
At the next light, he made a U-turn.
The green arrow stayed on long enough for three other cars, but he waited until it turned yellow before coming back.
May saw him.
“Twice,” she said.
Across the street, a woman in a green coat stepped out from behind the laundromat and stopped.
I saw Rachel’s face for less than a second.
Then she ran.
I pushed open the car door, but May grabbed my sleeve.
“Don’t chase.”
Rachel disappeared between two buildings.
My father pulled into the lot and climbed out, holding both hands away from his sides as if his posture could make the pursuit look reasonable.
“I only wanted to see who came,” he said.
My mother walked toward him.
For the first time in my life, she did not soften her voice.
“You saw her two years ago.”
He told her to get into the car.
She took his keys instead.
He stared at her open palm.
She closed her fingers around them and walked away.
We waited inside the laundromat until six twelve.
Rachel did not return.
June swept beneath machine nine, moving the same gray clump of lint back and forth because it kept catching on a cracked tile.
May sat with the rabbit in her lap and watched the window.
Not yet.
At home, my father packed a small suitcase and said he would stay at a motel until everyone became rational.
My mother did not ask which one.
