9 Letters (15 page)

I baked up one of those potatoes,
started some bacon. With the bacon sizzling in its fat in the pan, I
looked at the table. Looked at the letters. Not yet. I’d cook a
good meal first.

Thing about bacon, though, was
that Emily and I liked it the same way. Crispy. And she’d
taught me how to get potatoes crispy outside, creamy inside. She’d
laughed at me once when I’d tried to cook it for her without
scallions.

My phone started going off in my
jacket pocket, but my jacket was across the room and you don’t
abandon your post when you’re cooking bacon. It rang, rang,
stopped.

I dropped a few pieces of bacon
onto a paper towel, then went over and got my cell. Listened to the
voicemail.

“Hey,” Rae said. I
knew her voice already. “It’s Rae. It was nice running
into you today. Sorry for inviting myself over, I think I was just
hungry or something.”

She laughed and I laughed too,
relieved she’d taken it upon herself to make a joke of the
whole thing, smooth it over rather than let it hang awkward between
us.

“Anyway I, uh, wanted to
check in, see how King was doing. Some people are going to the park
tomorrow, a dog park, the one up on east 32
^nd
.
We usually wind up in the back corner, by the trees. Should be there
around noon. Not sure when works for you, what hours you work. But
anyway, in case you wanted to hang out, maybe get King out of the
house.”

I stared at the phone for awhile,
just kind of contemplating it, then pressed delete.

Sure we’d almost kissed the
other night after the bar. But what did a woman like Rae want with a
man like me? The hell did I have to offer her? Maybe nothing. She was
probably better off without someone like me around.

I got the potatoes out of the
oven, filled them up with sour cream, and sat down at the table to
eat.

But I didn’t eat. I just
sat there while the bacon got towards cold. After awhile, I couldn’t
help myself. Got out my phone, started looking through pictures.

I had pictures of Emily, sitting
at that table, eating that very meal. If I held up my phone at the
right angle, it was like she was there, sitting across from me.

She was scowling a little in the
pictures. Didn’t like her picture taken, not outside the ones
we’d had done on our wedding day, and that was knowing a
professional was handling the photography. So there she was, grumpy
Emily, flashing me her grumpy face.

She used to pick at her food when
she was grumpy.

There was a certain peace, an
awful peace, found in letting myself float away into that oblivion.

There she was, across from me,
picking at her food, grumpy and alive. She’d spent so long
alive. So many years. I smiled.

I cleaned up, scrubbing at the
baking pan with steel wool like I was scrubbing out everything bad
that had ever happened. I used too much soap, went at it too hard.
Didn’t care.

But then I was done, and I sat
back down at the table, arranged the letters. Felt the ground beneath
my feet. Let myself sink into my chair. Feel present. Let myself know
she wasn’t across from me, that the picture was just on my
phone. That these letters were what was left of her.

Unclipped and unfolded my knife,
cut open the sixth letter. Re-clipped my knife. Deep breath. Shot of
whiskey that I looked at but didn’t drink. Unfolded the paper.

“Hey,” the letter
started. “So...this one is for me. I know that’s awful,
but I guess here I go, asking you to do something for me still.
Anyway, I want you to call my sister. I think Natalie probably misses
me as much as you do.”

I didn’t think that was
true, because it wasn’t possible. No one could miss Emily as
much as I did and survive. But I didn’t feel like arguing with
a ghost. I kept reading.

“I always wanted you guys
to like each other more. Help her. That’s what life’s
about, as I figure. Helping people. Especially family. Is she still
your family? Does she still feel like family? Either way, give her a
call. Listen to her, let her listen to you.”

Natalie didn’t feel like
family. Emily’s parents, especially her mom, they’d tried
to reach out to me. They’d kept up with me for months, and I
think they would have stuck with it longer if I had reached out back
to them. I could have been there for
them
,
too. No parent should bury a child, just like no one should bury
their spouse. But I hadn’t been there. I knew that.

I could see reaching out to her
parents. I’d even meant to. One day I would. But Natalie? There
were two people in the world who sometimes found it in the dark of
their soul to blame me for Emily’s death. I was one of them.
Natalie was the other. She didn’t want to hear from me. I
didn’t want to hear from her. There was no way I could call her
without apologizing for the way things’d soured between us, for
the way I’d spoken to her last time she called, and to be
honest I wasn’t ready to do that.

It was the first letter with
instructions I didn’t want to follow.

Then I remembered my dad’s
advice, when I first got engaged. I’d been terrified he was
going to try to give me the birds-and-bees talk in the age of the
internet, but I got lucky. He’d given me the kind of advice you
don’t easily find with Google.

“Your wife is in charge,”
he’d told me. “She’s not in charge of you. She’s
in charge of her. But if you want the relationship to do you
both
good, that means if she puts her foot down, she’s in charge. If
she asks you to do something, she’s going to have a reason. You
need to think that through, figure out what her reason is. Odds are
good, real good, that whatever her reason is, it’s more
important than you-don’t-want-to-do-it or whatever lazy excuse
you’ve got.”

Once he’d told me that, I
started looking at my folks in a different light. I started to
realize they both did that for each other. That compromise wasn’t
meeting people halfway, most of the time. That compromise was more
often about taking turns learning to value the other’s needs
over your own wants.

But I looked at the clock, and it
was nearly 10. Another thing my dad had told me, when I’d been
much younger, was that you don’t ever call anyone after 10pm
unless someone’s dead.

Someone was dead, but she’d
been dead a year. It was too late to call Natalie. Maybe tomorrow.

Instead, I went over to the
couch, pulled the guitar into my lap, and started to play.

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

I needed to write some new songs.

I’d like to say I had a
good productive morning, that I cooked myself a good breakfast again,
that I practiced guitar, went for a run, took the recycling out to
the curb. But I didn’t.

I woke up at 7am like my body
told me to, but I laid around in bed for a good hour after that
reading sports crap on my phone. Then I made it downstairs, fixed up
a bowl of kid’s cereal, and sat around in my briefs eating
cereal on the couch with the TV showing inferior sports like
football.

When I got cold, I should have
gotten up, done some jumping jacks, stretched out my sore muscles.
Instead, I got up, found the thermostat, cranked it up.

To hell with it. I deserved it.

For some reason or another.

Wasn’t sure what. I’d
come up with that later.

Mostly, though, I was trying not
to make up my mind about whether I was going to that dog park. So I
just let time disappear from under my feet until it was too late to
make a decision.

“Alright, King,” I
said, pulling the harness and leash off the coat rack by the door.
“Get your ass over here. We’re going to get you some
socializing.”

The whole place looked more than
a little like a baseball field, only instead of boys running around
happy with bats, there was dogs running around happy with dogs. And
it was bigger.

I kept King on leash until I
found Rae in the back corner, watching a group of small dogs. There
were a couple other folks around, but the way Rae was standing in
relation to them, it was obvious they were strangers.

“Hey,” she yelled,
when she saw me walk up. She waved big, over her head, as if there
was a chance in hell I’d miss her.

Every time I saw her, it was like
all my troubles felt a little bit further away. Maybe it was just
because she hadn’t known me at my worst, when I was in such
utter despair. No, that wasn’t it. It was that she hadn’t
known me at my best. She’d never seen me with Emily. She just
accepted me as me. No pitying glances, no thinking how far I’d
fallen, nothing like that.

I closed the distance, and King
started pulling at the leash as soon as he saw her. I knew the
feeling.

“Glad you could make it,”
she said. She reached out for a hug, and I hesitated for half a
moment before accepting it. She was warm, and I tried not to be so
completely aware of her breasts as they pressed into me.

“I don’t go on shift
for a couple hours still,” I said. I opened my mouth to finish
the thought by telling her I wasn’t volunteering that day,
either, but my mother didn’t raise a braggart.

“You can let him off leash,
you know,” she said. She knelt down, took King’s face in
her hands, and gave him a kiss on the snout.

“Yeah,” I said. “I
just, uh, I didn’t know how he’d handle other dogs.”

“He’s fine,”
she said. She unclipped his leash from the harness, and King looked
up at me. I nodded, and he took off towards the mess of his canine
soon-to-be buddies. Damn, what a dog.

“Which one’s yours?”
I asked. The other humans were milling around about ten feet away,
and there were five dogs scampering over one another, chasing one
another.

“Muffin, he’s the
terrier. I didn’t name him.”

“A terrier, that’s
the little black and tan one? With the funny beard kinda?”

“Yeah,” Rae laughed.
“That’s a terrier.”

“Cool,” I said.

King was bouncing up and down in
a way I’d never seen him do. He was a bloodhound. Bloodhounds
were supposed to be lazy. I think.

“Where are you friends?”

“No one could make it,”
she said.

“Did things go alright,
after the other night?”

“Yeah,” she said.
“Well, alright enough. Irina’s gotta find some new trashy
hipster to crush on, but I don’t think it’ll take her too
long. Thanks again for taking care of that.”

“Both my job and my
pleasure,” I said. “Not every day I get to throw a trashy
hipster out of my, uh, trashy hipster bar.”

“It’s not a trashy
hipster bar!” Rae protested. “I mean, unless it is?
Shoot, does that make me a trashy hipster too?”

“Here I am with my foot
sticking out of my mouth when I’m at the dog park on a gorgeous
day with my dog and my new friend,” I said, hoping to defuse
the situation. It seemed to work.

“How’s it going with
King?”

“Good,” I said. “We
went for a run the other day, even.”

“He was pulling ahead on
you, just now. You know I trained him to heel, right?”

“You did what?”

“King!” she shouted.
King looked up. “Come!” The dog bounded over to her, and
she clipped him onto the leash. “Heel,” she said, and
then she started walking.

I whistled in amazement. King was
just trotting along, exactly at her side. No pulling, no hesitating,
no stopping to sniff without permission.

She handed me the leash. “Heel!”
I said, starting to walk around.

He heeled.

She knelt down, took the leash
back off.

“Pound it,” she said,
holding out her fist.

My dog lifted his paw and gave
her a kind of doggie fist bump.

“Holy crap,” I told
her. “You’re the dog whisperer.”

“Damn right,” she
said.

I knelt down. “Pound it,”
I said.

King pounded my fist. I had a dog
that could pound my fist.

We found ourselves walking the
perimeter of the park, and without being asked, Muffin and King
started around with us. They got on like wildfire, those two.

“I bring Muffin here
because the fence at home, it’s pretty beat up. Got gaps in it.
Little dog like him just gets right through them cracks and wanders
off if he gets bored while I’m working. So I gotta keep him
inside unless I’m with him.”

“So who emasculated your
poor little dog?”

“The vet,” she said.

It took me a minute to get the
joke. I’m not the fastest. But then I started laughing, and she
started laughing.

“Derek, my ex, he was the
one who named him Muffin. I think he did it because he was jealous I
had another man in my life, wanted to bring him down a peg.”

“Your ex got jealous over
your dog?”

“Derek’s not the most
un-jealous person around.”

“Idiot,” I said.

“You ever get jealous?”

“Nah,” I said. “Well,
I mean, sometimes, when I’m being stupid. But then someone told
me ‘jealousy is when someone else has something you don’t.’
So I never got jealous when Emily spent any time with the boys,
because I got to spend time with her too, and I got to do more than
that. No reason on this earth to be jealous.”

“Emily?”

I sure hadn’t meant to
bring up Emily.

“My wife,” I said.
“Well, she was my wife.”

“That’s right. You
mentioned that.” Rae’s hand came up and squeezed my arm
for a second, and then she did something I didn’t expect. She
smiled, that dimple coming out high on her cheek. “I can tell
she was real special, Luke. You were lucky to have her.”

“Damn right I was,” I
said. I looked over at her. The sympathy was there, in her eyes, but
it wasn’t pity or anything. I appreciated the way Rae never did
that, never treated me like I was some hurt animal you had to feel
sorry for.