9 Letters (29 page)

“Thirty schools? You
applying to them all?”

“Well, I’m hoping I
get into the one in Manhattan.”

I dropped my fork, stared at her.

“Manhattan, Kansas,”
she said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.
“I knew that.”

“Luke Cawley, you think I’m
the kind of girl who wants to live in New York City?”

“Well...” I said.

“I might not drive a truck
but I’m as much a child of Missouri as you are,” she
said.

“I didn’t say
nothing.”

“New York City. Pssh.”

“If you don’t get
into the one in Kansas, though?”

“I might have to move,”
she said. “I mean, I’d move to Manhattan if I got in
there. But I might have to move. Florida, California. Pennsylvania.
Oklahoma. I applied all over the place. You want to know why I didn’t
apply right after my undergrad?”

“Why?”

“Derek, that bastard. He
told me if I left he wouldn’t come with me, but that he also
wouldn’t be able to get by without me.”

“Damn,” I said.

“I should have left.”

“Emily, she never tried to
hold me back from my dreams. She helped me go after them.”

“Sounds like we had the
opposite kinds of bad luck,” Rae said. “I feel bad,
complaining about Derek, when I think about what you’ve had to
go through.”

“No,” I said. I’d
been tossing over this idea for a week or so. I was excited to get to
say it, to tell Rae. “I’m the luckiest man that’s
ever been born, that’s how I figure it. I don’t always
feel it, but it’s how I figure it.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I met the love of my life,
and I thought she was the only chance I had to be happy. Then she
died. And now? Now I’m learning a whole new way to be happy.”

Rae blushed again, reached across
the table, and held both my hands.

After dinner, we went to a movie.
Most of the time, the best date is a simple one. Dinner and a movie.
An American tradition probably as old as cinema, and for a good
reason. Sure, it’s important to mix it up, but it’s
always a good way to have a good time. Terrible for first dates, of
course, that’s where people go wrong. First dates, you’re
stuck choosing a movie before you know each other, stuck being quiet
in the theatre when you’d rather be getting to know one
another. A dog park, a field in the countryside. Those are where you
get to know someone better.

Turns out, Rae and I both had the
same taste in movies. Well, overlapping taste. Hollywood action is
okay, but I’ll take crime drama any day. We were catching
pretty much every good drama that hit the theatre.

Afterwards, we were walking out
to my truck. I’d driven, because maybe Rae’s car gets
better mileage, but I love my vehicle and she tolerates hers.

“I love movies like that,”
Rae said. “Nothing too sappy, nothing too full of explosions.
Something full of characters just doing their best to get through
life.”

“Amen,” I said. Then
I thought awhile longer about that. “Stories about love and
death. Sometimes I think there’s nothing in this world that
isn’t about love or death or both.”

It didn’t take long for my
thoughts to drift from there to Emily, about when I’d gone
through life not thinking about death. When I’d been a child.

Thinking about her, just for a
second, it didn’t hurt. If I’d lingered on the thought
too long, I’m sure I could have summoned up pain. But the wound
was closing. It was even a little warm, thinking about Emily. She was
looking down on me from heaven. Maybe literally, maybe not.

Maybe Mike was right. Maybe all
my fears in the midst of grief were right. It almost didn’t
matter, because I could feel her looking down at me from heaven, and
that was enough.

I started the engine, but I’d
gotten quiet. Rae had noticed.

“Were you just thinking
about Emily?”

“Yeah.”

I felt her hand clasp mine. I
took a deep breath.

“There’s something I
have to do,” I said. “But I want us to do it together.”

We got into the house and our
dogs were waiting, anxious. I was anxious too, but a dog’s
needs, they can’t wait. Because a dog doesn’t know what’s
going on. If you’re going to be an animal’s master,
you’re its keeper. And since it doesn’t know what’s
happening, sometimes you’ve got to prioritize its needs over
your own.

Then I remembered I wasn’t
on my own. I didn’t have to do everything by myself.

“Are you alright letting
the dogs out into the backyard?” I asked Rae. “I’ll
join you out there in a minute.”

She nodded, and headed to the
back of the house. I went up the stairs. Went to the drawer of the
bedside table.

It had been our bedside table.

Now it was mine.

That’s the way of the
world, I guess.

Took a deep breath, and took out
the last letter. Still unopened. I went down the stairs, out to the
back porch.

Rae was waiting there for me, in
the slight chill. My girlfriend for months. I hoped she’d be
for longer. A lot longer. It was time to let her in, completely let
her in. There was no reason to keep anything like this secret. She’d
known about the letters, of course, already.

We sat at the patio table, with
the porch light on us and the dogs sitting happily at our feet.

I took a deep breath, then pulled
my knife from my pocket. It had turned up, sure enough. I carefully
cut open the letter, then pulled it out.

“You ready?” Rae
asked.

“I’m ready,” I
said. I didn’t need whiskey. Just the strength that had grown
in my heart.

She took me by the hand, and I
unfolded the letter.

Dear, dearest Luke.

My heart.

I don’t have more wisdom
for you. I don’t have any more steps you can take.

I can never make up my mind about
who has it worse, you or I.

When I’m feeling selfish, I
think it’s me. I think about all the futures I won’t
have, and it hurts worse than this cancer does. Maybe we would have
ended up going out to the country. You could run a good ranch, you
and I. I’d deal with the animals, you’d deal with the
buildings. I could deal with the customers, you could deal with the
employees.

I think you don’t know it
yet, but I bet you’ll make a good instructor one day. I’ve
seen the way you’re patient with people who are learning. I’ve
seen it when you were training up that kid as shortstop, the
sophomore who took over after you graduated. I’ve seen it at
the bar when you’re explaining baseball, all those stats, all
that math. You always listen to exactly what the listener wants to
know and then help them learn the information themselves. You’d
make a great father.

I wish I could have been the
mother. But I won’t be. Someone else should be.

Or maybe we wouldn’t have
gone out to the country. Maybe we could have stayed in the city and
grown old there, and you could have fixed up the house and I could
have seen our kids grow up and fall in love. That would have been
something.

That’s what I think about,
when I think I’m the unlucky one.

Then I remember what you’re
going through now, what you’re about to go through when I’m
gone. I’m as worried about you as I am about me. Maybe more so.
Because...I know what’s going to happen to me.

I’m going home to heaven.

I wasn’t always the best
Christian. I believed, but kind of absent-mindedly. God was something
I could deal with later. It helped that I’ve never been drawn
to sin. Never wanted to live my life in un-Christian ways. So I
didn’t really have to fuss about anything. But once you’re
dying, you’ve got all the time you could ever want to think
about life and death and heaven and God. If I was a better writer, if
I could think more clearly, I’d tell you what I’ve
learned. Tell you in a way that could convey the information to you
clearly.

Instead, all I can tell you is: I
can see Him in everything, now. Dying, it’s just like going
home. He made us. He made me. And I’ll be dead soon, and dead
is the same as heaven. It’s pretty literal, heaven. Hell, hell
might be more metaphorical. I don’t know what’s blasphemy
and what’s not, because I’ve never made it through the
whole of the good book and now it’s too late, but I don’t
think there’s a hell except what’s of our own making. If
you die with all the weight of sin on you, unconfessed, you’ll
have eternity to think that over. Because when the light of God is on
you, you know what’s right and what’s wrong and you have
to live with yourself and all the evil you’ve done.

That’s what I believe,
anyway. That’s what I understand right now. There’s an
afterlife, and I’m heading there, and I’m heading there
with a clean soul.

Soon I’ll be dead, and that
makes me the lucky one.

You? You’ve got to deal
with the complicated stuff of life. You’ve got to hold your
head above water while dealing with all the weight of grief. You’ve
got to deal with the mundane stuff: the house, the paperwork, all of
that. You’ve got to clean up after me.

It can’t be easy. Me, I’ve
had to wrap my head around death, and then I’m done. You?
You’ve got to wrap your head around death and then you’ve
got to keep going. You’ve got to live. You’ve got to
unlearn the sorrow you’re learning at my bedside.

Even though...even though I have
never been more certain that you’re the man for me than I am
right now. Because you’ve been at my bedside this entire time.
You’ve taken care of me, you’ll keep taking care of me
until right up to the end, I know that. I knew it before, but it’s
sweet to see it confirmed. It’s sweet how much you care about
me, and I love you more and more with each passing day.

I’ve been writing these
letters in the snatches of time when you’re out of the room,
or, most often, when you’re asleep. I’ll give them to my
sister so that she can give them to you, a year from now. On the
anniversary of my death. I picked my sister because there are some
things you can only trust your sister to do. And because maybe it’ll
bring you two closer.

But all of this who is lucky,
who’s unlucky, it’s meaningless. For now, for these last
few hours or days or weeks, your pain is my pain, my pain is your
pain. Because we’re married, because we’re joined at the
soul. It doesn’t matter who has it worse: however bad we have
it, so does the other of us.

I want you to keep your head
above the water, and the only way you’ll do that is if you let
me go. Let me sink into the warm water of death, let me be in heaven
instead of on the earth. Let the memory of me, but not the weight of
me, stay with you. You’re going to have a great life, Luke, I
know it. You’re going to help people, teach people. Build the
things that people want, build the things that people need. You’ll
make yourself happy, and maybe someday you’ll make someone else
as happy as you’ve made me.

When you die, decades from now,
die well, without the weight of sin—real sin, like hurting the
weak or letting the powerful do the same, not that nonsense about not
sleeping with someone until you’re married. Live well, without
unconfessed sin, so that when you rejoin me, you’ll do it with
your head held high and your thoughts unclouded and you’ll
really be able to be with me, to join with me once more.

We’ll be together again.
But don’t hurry on your way. Take as long as you need. I can’t
wait to see you again.

Love,

Emily

<<<<>>>>

THE END

My sincerest thanks go out to my
friends on social media and my readers, and also to my band, who gave
me so much grief when they found out I was working on this book that I
knew I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t finish writing
it. Thanks, guys, for motivating me and for letting me slide on those
few practices I had to miss while finishing up the last few chapters.

I’d also like to thank my
granddad, who taught me the value of hard work, Miller Coors Brewing
Company for helping me write through the toughest spots, and Alyssa
Wong for the dimple.

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