9 Letters (21 page)

Nice thing about someone as
forthright as Natalie, though, is that when she smiled for a half
second when she saw me after walking through the door, I know she
meant it. She didn’t do much just for the sake of keeping up
appearances, or keeping her dead sister’s husband happy.

She sat down, looked at the menu
for less than a minute before putting it back down.

The waiter appeared, like magic.
Natalie ordered in Spanish, but I knew enough Spanish to know she’d
gotten tacos carne asada. Mostly because those are Spanish words
already. I got a burrito.

“What’s up?”

“I know you don’t
like coming into the city,” I said. “So, first of all,
thank you.”

“It’s alright,”
she said. She turned and looked out the window. “I don’t
know what you get out of it, though. There’s people, everywhere
you look. And the buildings? The buildings—”

“Are taller than the
trees,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

“I don’t think we’re
meant to live like this, is all,” Natalie said.

“I like both,” I
said. “I like seeing people walking down the street. I like
seeing people happy or pissed off or sad, I like seeing little kids
with that look on their face like they know they’re alive and
they just can’t get over how amazing that is. I even, God help
me, I like seeing couples. I hated it for awhile, but I like it,
because I like to know that someone, somewhere, is happy.”

“I get all of that when
they come to the rodeo,” Natalie said. “And you say you
want both, but it just means you’re not really getting either.
Living in the city then coming out to the country like you’re a
damn tourist.”

“All right,” I said.
I wasn’t trying to fight. And we’d heard it all from each
other before. Last time we’d gone down that route, I’d
told her she was trying to have it both ways too, that she liked
people just as much as me. And that she needed folks like me to go
see
those rodeos, and we weren’t a bunch of rubes, either. That we
had our own reasons to put down roots in the city.

“What’s with the
guitar?” she asked.

Her beer came, Dos Equis, and she
poured it into a glass and started it down.

“A box of letters showed up
on my doorstep, one year after she died.”

She put down her glass, looked at
me closer.

“No postage or nothing.
Just a box on my porch. I opened it up, there were nine letters
inside. Nine letters to me from Emily. Each one has given me an
instruction. Something to get my life back together.”

I couldn’t read Natalie,
how she was reacting. “Like what?”

“Like, get a dog. Clean my
house. Volunteer. Stuff like that. Simple stuff, practical stuff.
She’s not trying to hold my hand through the emotional bits of
it, not really. She’s actually just keeping me on the right
track.”

“All right,” Natalie
said.

I almost told her I’d
called her because Emily had told me to, but that kind of honesty
wasn’t going to do either of us any good.

“Here’s letter number
seven,” I said, and I handed it to her.

She opened it up, started to
read. I knew every word of it by heart, already.

“You remember that night,
our first anniversary, when we finally got our honeymoon? I remember
how you were so convinced you had to get your guitar strapped to that
poor horse, until we’d given up and bought you a backpack case
so you could carry it yourself. I’d thought you were being
silly, that it was just a week and there was plenty we could get up
to without you needing to practice your guitar.”

She’d actually even laughed
at me, but she’d had such a sweet way of doing it that it felt
good.

“That first night, though,
we were out on the porch and it was cold out there but we had the
stars. And you played for me. Not your silly love songs, either, just
country. You do a mean outlaw country cover of pop country. When you
sang that stuff it got right into my heart and it lifted me up and
that’s one of the nights I’m going to remember until the
day that I...well, it’s something that’s stayed with me.
So here I am thinking about that night, and I’m thinking that
music is to share. Share your music, Luke. Get your friends about as
tenth as happy as I was that night and they’ll love you for
it.”

Natalie folded up the letter, as
reverent with it as I had been. She put it back in the envelope and
handed it back to me.

“You should play an open
mic night,” she said. “Those are the kind of things
you’ve got in the city, right? Go play an open mic night,
invite your friends.”

“I’m on my way to do
that right after dinner,” I told her.

“That’s good,”
she said.

Our food came, then, and I went
at it with a hunger I hadn’t felt in awhile. We were silent for
a bit as we devoured our food, and it was weirdly comfortable eating
with her. I knew she didn’t like me all that much. The feeling
was mutual. But the way in which we didn’t like one another was
the way in which siblings don’t always like each other. There
was something to that marriage thing. Something to being family.
Something to putting up with someone just because your wife is their
sister. Something to a shared source of grief.

“You should come,” I
said.

“What?”

“After dinner. It’s a
spot just down the way, I was going to walk. Some people there are
pretty good. Most of them aren’t, but it’s nice either
way. You should come.”

“Nah,” she said.
“Thank you, but I don’t think that’s really my
scene.”

The sun was setting, its light
caught in the glass of a nearby tall building and bounced all around
the street. There are things worth being in the city for. Little
things.

“That’s not why you
called, though,” Natalie said. “You didn’t call me
in the middle of the night because you were hoping I’d come see
you sing.”

“I miss her,” I said.
My eyes were dry, as I said it. “Every damn day, I wake up and
the first thing I notice is that she’s not there.”

“I dream about her,”
Natalie said. “Not every night, but three, four times a month I
dream about her so hard that I wake up and I’m just ruined. I
dream about her sometimes where she’s alive, and we’re
just doing the most mundane stuff together but in those dreams I know
she’s supposed to be dead. The fact that she’s not is
this miracle that kind of forces meaning into every damn thing we’re
doing. Like, we’ll be hosing down port-o-potties and I’ll
be thinking ‘Emily’s alive. Holy mother of shit, Emily’s
alive.’“

I stared at her, listening.

“Then there are dreams
where she’s dead, or she’s in the hospital, and those are
just the run-of-the-mill kind of heartbreaking. I told you I’d
drive in to see you today because when you called, you woke me up
from this dream I was having. In that dream, Emily was dead, and I
was sitting at my desk in the middle of this winter cornfield, all
dead stalks all around me, buried under snow and ice, and I was at my
desk writing Emily a letter.

“It turned into a stress
dream, where I was trying to figure out if the postal service still
had service up to heaven, or if maybe I had to take it to church and
get the pastor to do it, or maybe there was some
reason
why it just wasn’t done anymore and it was some massive faux
pas that I was going to mail her a letter.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“So I was dreaming about
writing her letters, but there she was writing you letters.”
The words caught in Natalie’s throat. I pretended not to notice
the water in her eyes.

“I miss the mundane stuff
too,” I said. “I miss it maybe the most.”

“Emily managed to make
everything a game,” Natalie said.

“Yeah.”

She leaned forward, warming to
the subject, light coming back into her eyes like I hadn’t seen
in too long. “You’d never get bored, doing chores with
her. When she was little, she went through these phases where
everything was a ‘quest.’ Mom gave us something to do,
and she’d snap to attention and say ‘yes ma’am, it
will be done,’ or something like that.”

“She held onto that, I
think,” I said. “Not the quest thing, not specifically,
but the idea that every little thing you did, that was part of life
and life was beautiful, so clearly every little thing you did was
meaningful.”

“I bet that’s why she
wrote you those letters,” Natalie said. “So you could see
that with your own eyes, that life is made out of little steps. Clean
your house. Get a dog. Little things that you do that together make
up a life.”

She finished off her beer all of
a sudden, in one long swallow.

“That’s why she sent
the letters to you,” she said. “She sent them to you
because you need that. The last days of her life, that’s what
she was doing I guess, was writing you letters. Was fixing you. The
rest of us, she loved just as much. We just didn’t need it.”

“She loved you all so
much,” I said.

“Yeah, well, she stayed in
the city with you.”

“We were talking,
sometimes, about maybe moving out of the city.”

“Bullshit,” she said.
“Maybe you were talking it, but it was bullshit. You weren’t
going to do it. Least of all were you going to get a nice trailer,
hitch it to your truck, and live life like we grew up. Because that
wouldn’t work for you. And Emily, she always would do whatever
worked for Luke Cawley.”

“She was happy.”

“I’m not saying she
wasn’t. I think she even liked that about you. All cultured and
big city. She just, shit. She could have done better in life. It’s
not on you. There’s nothing in the world that could have
changed you into someone you’re not. You’re a city boy.
Born that way, and you’re going to die that way. And it’s
not what I’d wanted for her. She deserved a better life than
you could have given her. Not that you gave her much. You just took.”
Her voice had gone bitter. There was the Natalie I remembered.

I stared at my half-full glass,
numb.

I was out of fight, the same as I
was out of tears. Natalie had her truth. Nothing she said was a lie.
It was mean, it was downright rude, but none of it was a lie. Emily
had left something of herself at the doorway of our house.

But so had I.

That’s what a marriage is.
Two people figure out where they overlap, and where they don’t.
Collectively, they weigh what they get and what they leave behind,
and they decide if it’s worth it. Never for a single moment had
I ever regretted marrying Emily, not even when she was sick, not even
when she was dead and I was a wreck. Yeah, Emily had given up a lot
to help me get to my dreams faster, but I’d put down my dreams
so I could be with her, so I could support her. Because my dreams
shifted. I didn’t want to just be a contractor—or a
baseball player, or a rock star—I wanted to be a man who took
care of my family. Of my wife, and one day, my kids.

Never for a moment had Emily
doubted she’d made the right decision. Yeah, I was a wreck
sometimes. Yeah, I wasn’t perfect. Emily had given me a lot.
But she’d done it of her own free will. She’d done it
because she’d wanted to. Always.

Natalie didn’t need to hear
any of that, and it wouldn’t do me any good to tell her. She’d
get it, someday. Maybe. But most important, I wasn’t there to
fight.

“Emily loved you,” I
said. Because I thought that was what was really happening. Natalie
was jealous, I figured. “It wasn’t a small thing, for her
to be away from you. It broke her heart to be so far away. I think it
broke her heart how much you didn’t like coming to see us. But
even when she was all broken up about it, there was never any doubt.
She told me she loved you, but more than that, I heard it in her
voice every time she talked about you. And I understand why.”

Natalie was stunned. The waiter
came and took our plates, left a check. I pulled a few bills from my
wallet, paid for the meal.

“There aren’t many
people in this world who miss her as much as you must, but I’m
one of them. If you want to talk about her, I’m down. Anytime.
Sixty years from now, I’m still down to talk to you about
Emily. Anytime you need to, you can call me.”

“You don’t take
nothing lying down, do you,” Natalie said.

“No ma’am, I do not.”

She lifted her eyes and looked at
me then, straight on, more clear-eyed than she’d been walking
in. “I don’t think I was wrong about you, Luke, but maybe
I wasn’t right about you either.”

I nodded. “Ain’t
much of a compliment, girl, but I’ll take it.”

Coulda been wrong, but I’d’ve
sworn that made her smile. Maybe one day we’d get right, after
all.

Every cafe I’ve ever been
to is a little bit different and little bit the same. This one, the
Blue Moon, was a little bit bigger than some, with a little stage up
in the far end. They swear the place wasn’t named after the
beer, but everything was blue and brown and I don’t know, it
just reminded me of a bottle of Blue Moon.

Blue Moon ain’t my
favorite, but I’ll drink it with no complaints out of my lips.
Which is more or less what I thought about the cafe. Not the place
I’m likely to make a ton of friends, just not really my scene,
but it’s down to earth and cheap. They ran an open mic night
because they were the kind of masochistic bastards who didn’t
mind when some college kid read his self-involved poetry he’d
written right before he took the stage. They were the kind of
masochistic bastards who didn’t mind when a poor slob with an
acoustic guitar like me played his heart out.

Dave and Damon and Holger were
there already, glued to their seats with a pitcher of beer, like they
just kind of lived at places like that. Holger’s wife Lindsey
was with them, too, and Holger was clearly on his best behavior. I
could tell because when I walked up, he was in the middle of doing a
dirty Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.