I walked over across the worn checkerboard linoleum, my boots making a soft scuffing sound against the wax, and slid into the seat across from her without saying a word. The waitress, a sharp-eyed girl with a name tag that said Brenda and hair dyed the color of a copper penny, came over with a glass pot before I could even get my breath. Coffee, Robert? she asked, looking at me like she knew my name from somewhere else, maybe from the hardware store where I used to buy my nails. Just black, Brenda, I told her, keeping my eyes fixed on the rim of Margaret’s cup.
We didn’t talk about Martha right away, and we didn’t talk about the weather or the way the town had grown up around the old lumberyard until you couldn’t even see the river from the bypass. Margaret set her mug down on the formica table and reached into her large black leather handbag, pulling out a flat rectangular box made of cedar wood with the corners worn smooth from years of being handled in the dark. She placed it right between the ketchup bottle and the sugar shaker, its lid held shut with a little brass latch that didn’t have any key to turn it. That’s the box, Robert, she said, her voice steady now, though her fingers were working the edge of her napkin into a tight little ball. That’s the box your mother handed me through our screen door on a Tuesday morning in October of sixty-two, right after the postman had dropped off the mail with the town postmark on it.
My mother had been down in the laundry room scrubbing the sheets when Clara walked right into our kitchen without knocking, looking as stiff and severe as a schoolmarm with her black leather purse clutched in both hands like she was guarding the church treasury against thieves. Clara told my mother, and she made sure I was standing right there by the pantry so I wouldn’t miss a single word of it, that you had met some girl from a wealthy family down in Missouri while you were doing your basic training, and that the two of you had gone down to the courthouse and gotten married between maneuvers to secure your discharge papers. She told me you were too ashamed to write and tell me yourself, so she had taken it upon herself to bring my letters back to me before I made a fool of myself by waiting around for a boy who already belonged to another woman.
I sat there in that orange vinyl booth while the smell of fried bacon and burned toast drifted over from the kitchen grill, and my brain felt like it was trying to run backward through a swamp. My mother had been dead twenty-two years, buried out in the Methodist plot under a stone that says Clara May Vance, Faithful Servant and Beloved Mother, and I had spent my whole life thinking she was just a hard woman who didn’t care much for show or sentiment. I never knew she went to Lake Street. I never knew she walked up those three wooden steps to Margaret’s kitchen and looked her in the eye with a lie so clean and sharp it cut sixty-three years out of two people’s lives before we even had a chance to start them. Margaret opened the cedar box with a small click of the brass latch, and inside, laid out in three neat rows like dead soldiers, were fourteen envelopes with my own teenage handwriting on the front, the stamps still canceled with the purple ink of the army post office, and every single one of them sealed tight the way I left them on my cot in Missouri.
She didn’t open them even then; she just let her fingers rest on the top corner of the nearest envelope, right over my return address on Elm Street, like she was touching something she had no right to disturb. My mother didn’t just lie about some girl down south, Robert, Margaret said, looking up at me with those blue eyes that hadn’t changed since we sat behind the dairy bar. She lied because she knew who my mother’s brother was, the one who left town with the mortgage money back in forty-eight before you and I were even old enough to walk to the schoolhouse together. It was a family pride thing, the kind of grudge that people in this county used to hold onto like a mortgage deed until it rotted right out of their hands.
The rest of the sentence on the back of that bingo card didn’t need much explaining after she said that, because I remember my father talking about my uncle’s debts in the kitchen late at night when he thought I was asleep upstairs with my homework. My mother Clara had never forgiven that side of the family for the shame of it, and when she saw me walking Margaret home from the ice cream shop on Lake Street with my hand in her coat pocket, she decided the line stopped right there in her own kitchen. We sat across from each other in that diner booth for nearly two hours while the morning rush died down and Brenda came by twice to warm up our cups without us asking. We didn’t talk about making up for lost time because you can’t make up for sixty-three years of birthdays and winter mornings and quiet suppers eaten across an empty kitchen table.
I told her about Martha, because Martha deserved to be spoken of honestly in the light of day, and Margaret listened without any bitterness in her face, nodding like she understood that we had both lived real lives that weren’t mistakes even if they weren’t the ones we planned when we were eighteen. She told me about her brother’s children down in the valley and the little brick house she bought after her parents passed away, where she grew tomatoes in big plastic tubs on the back porch because the soil was too hard for a proper garden.
When we walked out of the diner together around noon, the sun was hitting the canal water just right, turning the surface into a sheet of hammered silver that made you squint if you looked too long. We didn’t hold hands because we were too old for that kind of foolishness on the public sidewalk, but we walked side by side down toward the corner where Lake Street used to run before they put in the municipal parking lot and the dry cleaners. The old ice cream shop was gone, replaced by a brick storefront that sold cellular phones and computer ink, but if you stood right by the curb where the old sycamore tree used to be, you could still smell the damp earth under the asphalt if you closed your eyes. Margaret had to get back for her noon television program with her niece, and I had to get home before Chloe came over to check on my blood pressure pills, so we stopped by the green park bench near the brick water tower where the pigeons were fighting over a crust of stale bread.
Two old mugs of black coffee sitting on a weathered wooden table by the lakeshore wouldn’t have looked right in this part of town, so we just stood there for a minute by the green painted slats of that bench while the autumn wind came up off the water and ruffled the edges of our coats. Robert, she said, turning her head just enough so I could see the lines around her eyes that weren’t there on the dairy bar steps. Come by on Thursday. I’ve still got a couple of those yellow legal pads from when we were kids, and we can sit on the porch if the weather holds. I told her I would be there at ten o’clock sharp, and then she turned and walked down toward the bus stop without looking back over her shoulder, her boots making a steady, dry clicking sound against the concrete.
I stood there for a long time watching her blue coat get smaller and smaller until she turned the corner by the library, and then I put my hands deep into my pockets, felt the hard square of that folded bingo card against my ribs, and started the long walk back to the house on Elm Street.
