9 Letters (12 page)

I washed it down with a beer,
then turned on the TV and flipped through channels until I found
people throwing baseballs around.

“King,” I said, and
my new dog came over, jumped up on the couch. “I’m going
to be alright, right? I’m going to make it through this.”

King didn’t say nothing,
just looked at me, all dog-like and happy.

After an hour or so, I realized I
should sleep. Had to wake up early again, and no reason to stay up.
I’d just crack open another letter though. The fifth letter. I
knew I should wait, but I felt like I’d earned it.

I went back to the table, cleared
up from dinner, and set the letters back out like they belonged. The
first four on the left, open: King, a clean house, playing my Gibson
again, the volunteer work. The remaining unopened letters sat lined
up on the right.

I picked up the fifth envelope.
The “5” scrawled on it was written more sloppily than any
of the letters I’d opened thus far. I thought that through,
then in a barely-controlled frenzy I grabbed the unopened stack and
looked at their numbers.

Each successive letter was larger
and shakier than the one before.

It was like watching a movie,
when you know it’s going to end tragically but you just can’t
help yourself from wishing it wouldn’t. I knew Emily was dead.
But these letters, they were probably the last words she’d
committed to paper, and they traced her downfall as she’d come
to terms with her own death. I was reliving her last days, and I
wanted her story to end differently. I wanted our happily-ever-after.

And there I was, just worried
about
me
.
My wife had died. For so long, she’d literally been in her
deathbed, dying, and she and I both had thought about me.

She was an angel. Literal, now,
up in heaven; and figurative, back when she’d been alive.

But I couldn’t let myself
cry. I unclipped my knife from my pocket and folded it open. Cut open
letter number five, closed the knife, re-clipped it.

Took a deep breath. Sipped about
half a shot of whiskey. Still wasn’t brave enough to do this
sober. Someday, maybe.

“Well how about that,”
it started. “My Luke, off doing God’s work like I knew
he’d always do. How was it? I don’t even know what month
it is, where you’re reading this. Did I make you go build
houses in the dead heat of the summer? With snow on the ground? No, I
don’t think it would be snow. I won’t be around that much
longer, and you’re going to get these a year after...”

Her handwriting trailed off, and
a lot of the simple grace was gone from her pen strokes.

“But these letters aren’t
for me, they’re for you. I’ll tell you in person, here
and now, with the words from my lips, how I’m feeling. What
it’s like to have your body abandon you. What it’s like
to accept that what God has in store for you is different than what
you’d hoped. But that’s the way of it, ain’t it?”

Yeah, that was the way of it.
She’d told me as much, when I held her hand there in the dark
of the hospital room at night. When she’d wake up, startled,
while I read at her bedside. She’d told me about her pain, her
fear, her epiphanies. I saw her come to terms with mortality and I
saw her reach out to God more than she’d ever done when she’d
been too busy riding horses to do much praying. She’d told me.
She’d told me everything about her, out of her own lips, out of
the lips I kissed in illness and in health. Till death did we part.

“You must be exhausted. You
work yourself hard. So your only instruction is this: get a good
night’s sleep tonight. Whenever else you can, too, but at least
tonight. You earned it. I always did love watching you sleep.”

Her letter ended, abruptly as
that. I smiled, though. Put the letter back in the envelope, then
strode upstairs to bed. Stripped off my undershirt, felt my muscles
just start in to being sore. I knew I should stretch, maybe take a
hot shower. But sometimes, when you’re drinking, you
want
the hangover, because you want to remember what hell you put yourself
through. And sometimes, when you work your body harder than it’s
been worked in a year, you
want
to wake up sore. Because you want to remember what hell your body can
go through and come out stronger.

You want both because you want to
wake up and throw yourself back into life and really feel your body,
even if the way it feels is bad.

That’s what I was telling
myself, anyway, but I think I didn’t stretch because I was
tired as all hell and besides, Emily had told me to go to sleep. Who
was I to argue with a ghost?

I dragged my sorry butt into the
bed, pulled up the sheets. My head hit the pillow, and just as I
started to doze, King jumped up alongside me, put his head on my
chest. I fell asleep.

It’s what you get for a
discount. That’s what I kept telling myself, on my wedding day.
When I was twenty years old and life was open and waiting for me. And
I was waiting on chairs.

There weren’t any chairs.

There were supposed to be chairs,
of course. Wedding guests, they expect to sit.

But Emily had it handled. She was
eighteen and running her own wedding. I tried my best not to see her
in her dress before she walked down the aisle, but you don’t
handle a crisis and avoid getting seen all at once.

And honest to everything I’ve
ever believed in, she looked just as good stalking around the rose
garden, shouting into her phone, while one of her rodeo bridesmaids
ran after her keeping the train out of the mud, as she’d ever
looked anywhere.

Oh, it was going to rain, too.

Well, it
had
rained, the night before, even though the weather was supposed to be
perfect, warm enough in late September for a wedding in the rose
garden. Of course, it’s daffodil season in September, which is
why we got such a good deal on the venue.

And I barely had to worry about
any of it, because Emily was on it.

My mom, though, my mom was all
made of worries. She had her salt-and-pepper hair tied up into a neat
bun, had on her best blue dress. The one that Dad loved her in.

I was in a back room of the
reception hall, finicking with the suit in the mirror. My dad was
leaning against a counter, cross-legged, while my mom paced.

“The thing about marriage,”
my dad started, then trailed off.

I tied and re-tied my tie maybe
eight times. It was perfect the first time, probably, but that day
nothing was going to be perfect enough. I wanted Emily to remember
how I looked that day for the rest of our lives. I was sure that on
our fiftieth anniversary, me seventy, her sixty-eight, she was going
to remember me like that. You can’t risk messing up your tie
with that kind of pressure on you.

“I remember when I was,”
my dad went on, then trailed off again.

“Honey, don’t worry
about the rain,” my mom said. “And don’t worry
about the chairs.”

“I’m not,” I
said. It was mostly true.

“When it’s overcast,
color comes out better,” she said. My mother, she liked to
paint. “I shoot my reference photos of flowers when it’s
overcast anyway. The color. It’s just, it’s just more
magical. Not burned out by the sun.”

“That makes sense, Mom.”

“So even if it starts
raining, that’s what you should think about, you should think
about how great the photos are going to turn out.”

“How’re there going
to be photos if it’s raining?” my dad asked. “No
one’s going to let their camera get wet.”

“Stop putting worries into
his head. I’m sure the photographer will do a great job, rain
or no rain. He’s a professional.”

He was a professional, all right.
Professional rodeo photographer. I had no doubt his gear was built
for bad weather. What I doubted was that he actually knew how to
photograph a damn wedding. Didn’t say that, though. And of
course I’d find out later just what kind of magic that
photographer was capable of. If I hadn’t already learned it
enough from Emily, that man showed me I’d got no place ever
judging rodeo folk again.

My mom never really approved of
much of Emily’s family, though. She didn’t approve of
much of anything, really. Part of her charm.

“It’ll be fine,”
I said. “Emily’s got it.”

“Right,” my dad said.
“Emily can do anything.”

“Damn right,” I said.
My dad didn’t like me cussing. That day, though, I didn’t
much care what my dad had to say. It was my day. It was Emily’s
day.

Way too soon after that, I was
standing there outside in the overcast, and the caterer hadn’t
come through with chairs, so all the guests were standing. Mostly on
the grass or the flagstone, but some people were standing in the mud.

Adversity brings people together,
though, and pretty soon everyone was laughing and happy and talking
to strangers. One side of the aisle, my family—military folks,
God-loving folks. Some farmers, some businessmen. My cousin Ned had
flown in from Raleigh, North Carolina. On the other side, Emily’s
family—they were wild, that bunch. Mostly rodeo, some bikers. A
couple gentlemen I didn’t really want to ask what they did for
a living because I didn’t want to know. But overall, they were
devout, as devout or more so than me and mine. Good people. Everyone
who was there was good people, because they were family. In another
hour, everyone there on both sides of the aisle was going to be my
family, in God’s eyes at least.

I was standing in front of
everyone, my friends next to me, nervous. I didn’t have cold
feet. Well, I did literally. But I didn’t doubt that I was
doing the right thing, I never doubted that for a moment. I was just
nervous, a kind of aimless nervous. A nervousness that couldn’t
land on any specific worry or problem.

All my wandering thoughts were
brought back into focus when Emily showed up, walking down the aisle
on the crook of her father’s arm. It didn’t matter than
I’d known her three years, or even that I’d seen her in
her dress an hour prior. It was like I’d never seen her before
in my life, like I was struck with love at first sight.

With the clouds up above her, she
glowed brighter than the sky. My soul had never known such peace.

The pastor said his bit, but I
wasn’t listening. I was lost in Emily’s eyes, lost
memorizing every little line in her faint crow’s feet. Lost
tracing the bow of her lips. Lost in how indescribably lucky I was.
Lost in love.

“I understand you have
prepared your own vows,” the pastor said.

We both nodded.

“Luke Cawley,” Emily
said. “You are my heart.”

She waited a beat.

“You are my own, beating
heart, as much a part of me as the earth I walk on, as much a part of
me as the heaven above. You are the best thing I’ve found here
in this world, and if you’d have me, I am yours.”

She was crying a little, and both
our moms were crying a lot.

My best man, Dave, edged a little
closer to me, handed me my guitar. “Don’t do it,”
he said. “Just say something cute and get it over with.”

I ignored him, took the guitar.

Yeah, it’s cheesy.

It was also my wedding day, so
what did I care.

“I wrote this song for
you,” I said, and then I sang.

I’ve got a simple voice, a
plain voice. It’s clear, and I sing in key, but no one’s
beating down my door to sign me to a label. I sang her a simple song,
a short song.

The chorus, I sang twice.

“I will be yours / I will
always be yours.”

Some of my friends were kind of
laughing, in the audience, but honestly I think her family was into
it. None of that much mattered though, to be honest. Because Emily
stared at me the whole time like I was the only thing in the world.
That’s what mattered.

In the eyes of God, in front of
most everyone who mattered to us on Earth, we were joined. I kissed
her.

“The caterer messed up
dinner,” she whispered into my ear, after our kiss.

“What?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,”
she said. “I got it.”

The sky opened up just then, and
we ran into the reception hall just before the rain turned
torrential. Everyone made it in, relatively dry, and I was convinced
it was Emily who made that happen, who had kept the clouds at bay.

Whether or not she had the power
to fend off rain, she certainly had the power to save a botched
dinner. The caterer had only brought booze and cake, for some
unknowable reason, but Emily had called a rodeo favor in and a taco
truck was waiting outside, just under the overhang. El Jeffe’s
tacos, it said, painted on the side of the old bread truck. The
boss’s tacos. It was great.

“Well that could have gone
worse, I guess,” my brother said, coming up to me while I was
holding a paper plate of tacos de pollo in one hand and a plastic cup
of Coors in the other.

“It genuinely couldn’t
have gone better,” I said.

Mike laughed. “Well, the
caterer could have brought chairs, to start. And I’m not saying
that I would have done a better job officiating, but I would have
done a better job officiating.”

“It couldn’t have
gone better.” I started to walk away from Mike, because I was
too happy to bother defending my position. He wasn’t a pastor
yet, was still in seminary, and I hadn’t really wanted him to
officiate. He hadn’t taken that too well.

He came after me, grabbed my arm.
I flinched—Mike hadn’t always been the kindest older
brother, growing up. He meant well, toughened me up, but I still
couldn’t help but flinch.

“I’m happy for you.
I’m no good at saying it, so I say dumb things instead, but I
mean it. I’m happy for you.”

We weren’t really the
hugging sort, he and I, and my hands were full anyway. “Thanks,
man,” I said.

I had it in my head that a
wedding is a microcosm for your life, and mine was going to be
magical and adventurous and just inconvenient enough to keep me from
letting down my guard.