The Secret Letters (4 page)

A few days later, I looked out the little window in the kitchen door of the Wild Hare and saw Pam at the bar talking to Milo and a few of the regulars. I stuck my head out and motioned her over. “What's up?” I asked. She swung by every so often for a meal, but usually she told me in advance she was coming.

“Does something have to be up?” She sounded sweet and innocent, like she always did when planning an act of juvenile delinquency. “Can't I have a glass of wine at a nice restaurant?”

“Sure you can.” I was still suspicious. “Anything new? Did you find something?”

“Maybe I did.”

“And?”

“Do I get a free drink?”

“I'll buy you dinner. What have you got?”

She opened her purse and handed me a postcard with a picture of a southwestern-looking mountain, one of those flat-topped ones, with a bright red and yellow sky behind it like a bruise. I flipped the card over. On the back it said, “I'll never forget you,” in J.'s familiar handwriting. The printed caption of the postcard said, “Sunset over the Grand Canyon.”

“Well?” She looked pretty darn pleased with herself.

“You think this is their break-up postcard?”

“Seems like it.”

“Where was it?”

“In another box. You know how she squirreled things away. It was with a bunch of old patterns.”

“Patterns?”

“You know, for sewing. She probably stuffed it where she thought no one would ever find it.”

“‘I'll never forget you.' Wow.” I felt like crying. “He really loved her.”

“Apparently.”

“Was there anything else?”

“No, but I'll keep hunting. It wouldn't kill you to help with the house, you know.”

“Sure, I'll help. I mean, why should you have to do everything?”

“Hello?” She squinted at me. “Where's my sister Julie?”

“Cut it out.”

“Sorry. Yeah, that would be awesome. It's a fucking nightmare. I end up holding some stupid plate and thinking, well, maybe I could put this in my china cabinet, though it's already full of the other crap she gave me, and then I try to remember where she got the plate and if it meant something to her, and then it comes back to me, how Frank gave it to her for Christmas and she loved it—you know how he always bought her just the right thing, and then he was so happy, like he'd just won the Nobel Prize for present-giving—and before I know it, I'm standing there crying and two hours have gone by.”

This was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid. “I'll come by on my next day off.”

“That would be great.” She gave me a little pat on the arm. “What's the special?”

Oh, right, I had promised her dinner. “Herb-roasted local chicken with caramelized onions, local asparagus, and cannellini bean mousse. Comfort food.”

“Your recipe?”

“Yep.”

“No raspberry-fennel sauce?”

“Nope.” Hector always came up with pretentious shit like that.

“Good. I'll be at the bar.”

When I brought Pam her dinner, I found her talking to Milo again. Half an hour later when I came back, they were still blathering, though God knows what they had to blather about, since Pam wasn't interested in sailing and that was pretty much all Milo cared about. He used to care about the Wild Hare, too, but Hector said his heart just wasn't in it any more.

“OMG,” she said when she saw me.

“You liked it?”

“Incredible. Seriously.” She turned to Milo. “I don't know how she does it.”

“She's amazing.” He beamed at me. “We're lucky to have her.”

“Really, it was
so
good. The chicken was so crispy on the outside, so moist and juicy on the inside,” she said in a TV voice.

“You could make advertisements for us,” Milo said to Pam.

“Sure. I work cheap.”

I flashed her the stink eye. Was she
flirting
? She was training one of her evil smiles on Milo, like she always did when she'd lead on some poor jerk and then smash his heart to pieces. It was her hobby in high school. I guess I should mention that Pam was the good-looking one in our family. Norma, Donny, and I were dark and lumpy like Mom, but Pam and Tim had golden-blond hair, like our dad—I mean
their
dad—before he went bald, and lean, muscular bodies, and, in Pam's case, big boobs (not fake). Even now, although she looked kind of corporate with a splash of punk and was minutes away from forty, she was still pretty hot.

I glanced over at Milo. His eyes had that stupid glazed look guys got when they
talked to my sister. I decided to warn him if he showed any interest in her. My mother always said, “Don't shit where you eat,” and while this was totally disgusting, she was right.

“Stay away from my boss,” I said to Pam when Milo went into the kitchen to talk to Hector about food orders.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” She seemed truly surprised. “Can't I have a conversation with someone without you having to protect him?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on. I mean, he's a nice guy, we had a good conversation, no big deal.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing. Food, wine. The restaurant business.”

“You don't know anything about the restaurant business.”

“Whatever, Julie.”

“Just stay away from him. That's all I'm saying.”

“No problem.”

“Really, he's not your type.”

“Okay, okay, I get it.”

“Okay,” I said, like that settled it.

***

When I got home that night, I took the break-up postcard out of my shirt pocket and stuck it on the fridge with a Natty Boh magnet (bad beer, but an okay magnet). I stared at the flat, red mountain pictured on the card. In front of it were some cactuses with their arms sticking up into the sky. It felt like, if I really focused, the wind would start blowing and J. would climb down from the dark mountainside and stand against the red layers of cloud like a superhero.

Without really thinking about it, I fell into the habit of talking to the postcard. I said hello to it when I came home and goodbye when I left, and soon I was telling J. about my day, how my pork shoulder special was a huge hit, and one of the runners dropped a whole tray of oysters I'd just shucked on the dining room floor, and I was going to try black-rice risotto again, though I wasn't happy with it last time.

I was just telling J. about my big plans for a Thai seafood bisque when I heard Pam's ringtone. I figured she was calling to chew me out for not coming over to help her yet, but when I picked up, she said, “I just totaled my car.”

“Are you okay?”

“I wasn't in it. It was parked—”

“Blind curve?”

“Bingo.”

“Hit and run?”

“Yup.”

“Probably Ed again.” Ed was a drunk guy who lived up the street.

“Maybe, but I'll never prove it. He's probably got his pickup in the body shop already.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, here's the thing. I was thinking—”

I suddenly realized where she was headed: our mother's car. “No way.”

“It's just sitting in the driveway.”

“Don't even think about it.”

“It would only be for a day or two.”

“Norma will
kill
you.”

“She won't know about it.”

“She'll know. Go rent a car.”

“I hate to do that before the insurance claim is processed. It's so hard to get reimbursed.”

“Alls I can tell you is, if you drive the Grand Dame, you're taking your life in your hands.”

“I know, I know,” she said.

I knew she was going to do it anyway.

***

As I was driving up Main Street, a tow truck carrying a squished yellow car passed by. I parked safely across the street from our house—where any sane person would have parked her new Mustang—went into the house, and let the dogs cover my jeans with paw prints. I found Pam tethered to the wall phone in the kitchen. She saw me and rolled her eyes, then mimed a yapping mouth with her free hand. Norma. I tried to figure out what they were talking about, but mostly she just kept saying, “Okay, okay.”

“What did she want?” I asked when she hung up.

“She says I'm not packing fast enough.”

“Did you point out to her that you have a full-time job and she doesn't?”

“What do you think?”

I just laughed.

“She made an appointment with Ralph Sawyer,” she said. Ralph was an attorney who had dated Mom in high school. He handled her divorce from my father—I mean, Bill Barlow. He was kind of a celebrity: his commercials played on daytime TV with a little song that rhymed “Sawyer” and “lawyer.” “He's reading the will. We all have to be there.”

“Is she going to schedule it so I won't have to take time off work?”

“It's Friday at three.”

“FUCK. I can't believe her sometimes.”

“Believe.” This was Baltimore's motto, so everyone made fun of it. “And here's the best part. She wants the house packed up by then, so we can have it painted and put it on the market.”

I looked around the kitchen. Old Tupperware, chipped ceramic ducks, wall placards some moron thought were funny, dirty plastic flowers. Junk on every surface, and in a bunch of boxes, more junk. “Is the whole house like this?”

“Yep.”

“I guess you've got your work cut out for you.”

She punched me on the arm, hard.

***

For the next few days, every chance I got, I'd go over to my mother's house to pack and clean. After the first five minutes, I began to seriously question if we would ever get everything out of there. I'd go into the sewing room, aka Norma's old bedroom, and after I'd filled a dozen boxes with fabric, thread, seventeen tape measures, and enough needles to re-quill a porcupine, the room would look like no one had touched it.

“And she hasn't even sewed since the '70s,” I complained to Pam as we sat on the patio. Ricky's girlfriend Star had made us lunch again, consisting of little chunks of tofu and wilted lettuce wrapped in a stale, green tortilla. “Why have a sewing room?”

“Maybe she was planning to make us all matching outfits again.” She took a drink of whatever it was Star had poured into our glasses, then shuddered. I tried it: it tasted like Elmer's Glue. “I found a box of baby clothes under the bed in the guest room,” she added.

The guest room, as our mother called it, though she never had guests, was the room Donny and Tim had shared. There was still a wall of trophies they'd won in high school, in case the nonexistent guests wanted to admire them, and I was pretty sure a suitcase of Donny's clothes was still in the closet. I remembered Mom folding his old
shirts and crying after he died. I really didn't want to see any of that stuff again.

“Then there's the attic.” Pam shook her head.

“Can't we just hire someone to haul everything away?”

“What if there's something important mixed up with the junk? Something we want?”

“What could we want? I already have plenty of old Tupperware.”

“I don't know, Julie.” She gave me a significant look, then glanced over at Ricky and Star, who were canoodling on a bench and not paying any attention to us. “There might be some
old letters
or something.”

I mouthed the words “shut up.”

Pam gestured toward the young lovers and rolled her eyes to indicate that they wouldn't notice us if we put on sequined suits and sang “Copacabana.” They were gazing at the creek that ran under our house, pointing at rocks and fondling each other. Water ran beneath half the buildings on Main Street. I'd heard it was a nineteenth-century sewage-system issue, and that was all I wanted to know about it.

“She wants us to sell everything. No charity.”

I knew who “she” was. “We're not going to get any money for this garbage.”

“She says she saw a waffle iron just like Mom's in an antique shop for $75.”

“Oh, sure. Hey, have you gotten a rental car yet?”

“Not yet.” We both looked over at the driveway, where the Grand Dame sat.

“You better be careful,” I said.

“I'm only driving it at night. Like a vampire. I've been sleeping here so I can walk to work.”

“Whoa, Pammy, you're a vampire?” We finally had Ricky's attention.

“Yeah, that's right.”

“There's this dude in town who's a vampire, too. You want to meet him?”

“No, thanks.”

“Your kind of guy,” I said to Pam. She had to agree.

Ralph Sawyer had an office near the courthouse on the hill above Main Street where law firms clustered like ants at a picnic. It was always weird seeing him because he was so familiar from his commercials. Everyone in greater Baltimore knew the jingle about the attorney from Glen Burnie.

“Again, my deepest sympathy. She was quite a girl,” Ralph said as he greeted us. He was a big bear of a guy with hands that looked like they could scoop a fish out of a brook. It was funny how he called my mother a girl like they were still in high school. I wondered if my mom had ever slept with him. My guess, based on the dopey look on his face when he talked about her, was yes. He had drawn up her will for free, another pretty good indicator, when she first got sick, and seemed to be some kind of executor. It didn't matter to me, although Pam had been kind of annoyed about it. “She makes me go to law school, then acts like I'm only a bartender,” she said at the time. I didn't care who was in charge of what as long as I didn't have to do anything.

I had run up the hill from the Wild Hare and was still panting. Hector squawked when I asked him to cover for me, but when I told him I was seeing Ralph Sawyer about some important legal business, he shut right up. Pam had obviously been cleaning. Her hair was in a ponytail and it looked like she hadn't washed it in weeks, and a blob of dust clung to her sleeve. Ralph led us into a back room where Norma and Ricky were waiting for us at a long table.

“Late again,” Norma snapped. Pam and I waved a cheery hello as if she had just said something nice. Ralph motioned for us to sit and parked himself on a red leather throne. He looked around. “Is Timothy coming?”

“He couldn't make it,” Pam said. “I have his proxy.” Tim had told her to keep an
eye on Norma to keep her from fucking everything up or cheating the rest of us, but she didn't quote him.

Ralph looked disappointed, though if he knew Tim, he wouldn't have been. “Now, I'm sure you've had time to review the copies I sent you.”

“Copies?” Pam said.

“Didn't you receive yours?”

She looked confused and guilty, and I immediately figured out what the deal was: she hadn't been home in a week and hadn't checked her mail, but she didn't want Norma to know she'd been living at our mother's house. It was the kind of thing Norma would mind, since she minded everything. “I must have overlooked it.” Pink spots began to show up on her cheeks.

“I got mine,” Ricky said, holding up his photocopy, like he'd ever even glanced at it.

“Julia?” That was my real name.

“I, uh—” I had gotten some kind of fat envelope from Ralph in the last week, but hadn't bothered to open it. “I left mine at home.”

“Well, let's proceed. The estate is pretty straightforward: the life insurance policy, the house, and the car. The proceeds will be split five ways. And the will stipulates that the attorney—myself—is to receive a three-percent honorarium.” Ralph gave a little cough. Being an ambulance chaser, he worked on a percentage basis, Pam had told me.

“I see,” I said. At least Norma wasn't in charge, like she had always been because she was the oldest. Her idea of leadership when we were kids was to order us around, then tell on us when we stepped out of line. Frank had always laughed about this and called her the Colonel. I thought about Frank, who always found a way to make things funny and jolly. His goofy laugh, a combination of a snort and a giggle, rang in
my ears, and a stab went through me like it always did when I missed someone who was no longer around. Even after all these years, it was so easy to forget that they were gone. Once upon a time we had all sat around the dinner table every night while Frank made us laugh so hard that milk came out our noses and our mother yelled at us and sent us to our rooms. “They're just kids,” he always said, putting an arm around her and kissing her until she backed down and let us come back for blueberry pie.

I must have zoned out on what Ralph was saying, and when I tuned back in, he was discussing the house sale. “I trust you're almost finished emptying the property,” he said.

“Just about,” Pam said. This was a baldfaced lie. I winked at her, making sure the Colonel didn't see.

“Good. We need to set up a timeline. I assume the redecorating will be done by July. I recommend that you put the house on the market in August. The market is a little soft right now, but it's slated to pick up this fall, when school starts. Of course, the house is in the most desirable school district.”

Our grade school, an old stone building, had been turned into condos, but new schools were popping up on every corner. Our county had appeared on some lists of Most Desirable Places, so now everyone wanted to live in it, which seemed crazy to me. Every time I turned around, a farmer's field had disappeared and ugly townhouse developments with names like Bright Meadows and Happy Fields were there instead. I started to imagine myself in the woods again, walking toward the pond with the dogs running behind me, but Ralph's voice cut into my thoughts.

“You should put an ad for the Pontiac on Craig's List,” he said to Pam.

***

“Shit!” Pam hissed as we walked down the hill to Main Street.

“At least she doesn't know you've been driving it.”

“She knows. Did you see the way Ralph looked right at me when he said it?”

“Have you gotten your insurance money yet?”

“No, they're dragging their feet. I'm going to have to threaten to sue them. You know, they've got that whole procedure.”

“I know.” Living on the blind curve, we had hit-and-run claims down to a science.

As we reached the Wild Hare, I could see Milo through the window. He looked up, saw me, waved, then spotted Pam, and his face brightened.

“Gotta go,” I said, trying to get rid of her before Milo came out and started talking to her again. It was for his own good. “Hector's going to kill me.”

“What are we going to do, Julie? The more we pack and clean, the worse it gets.” She turned her head and spotted Milo, and I could see her give her hair a little smush to fluff it up, though it was pulled back in the dirty ponytail. I decided not to tell her about the dust bunny on her sleeve.

“I'll come over tomorrow. We'll kick ass,” I promised, opening the door to the Hare and giving her a little shove in the other direction. I bumped right into Milo and tried to steer him toward the kitchen, saying I wanted to talk to him about the special, but he said he'd be right back and shot out the door to say hi to my sister.

***

The attic was hot as hell; no, hotter. Frank had installed a big window fan but it hadn't worked in years. I could remember him explaining why it was important to ventilate your attic, how the best thing to do was close all the windows in the house, open the front door, and turn on the fan so it pulled hot summer air up out of the house and puked it back onto Main Street. I always thought this was silly and also, boring, but thinking about it now made me sad. He was constantly building things in the garage, trimming hedges so they looked like boxes, and carving turkeys with an electric carving knife and
talking on and on the whole time about the proper way to carve, how you had to hold the knife perpendicular to the plate to get those paper-thin slices. When he wasn't bustling around making home improvements, he was kissing my mother, fussing over her, flattering her, making googly eyes at her, and when he was around she seemed to let go of her grudge against the world for a moment. The rest of the time, she put up a good front, but I wouldn't call her a contented person, especially not after he died. He had a heart attack while shoveling snow off the neighbors' driveway during a blizzard, and it was two years before my mother spoke to those neighbors again. She said they should have shoveled their own fucking snow.

Pam had ordered me to go the attic and carry down some boxes. She decided that to avoid having to pay for a dumpster, we were going to have to start leaving loads of trash out every week, and we needed to step up our game. I had already carried down seventeen boxes full of old canceled checks. Norma wanted us to have any papers professionally shredded for security reasons, but Pam said that was bullshit and ignored her. I'd never thought about what happened to things like bank accounts when a person died. I knew my mother was gone and not coming back, but there were parts of my brain that hadn't quite figured it out yet, so every time I ran into something that made me think she was still around, those parts woke up to her loss all over again and felt surprise and pain so dumb it embarrassed me. One time in her closet I was going through clothes that still smelled like her and said to Pam, “Do you ever get the feeling she's still around somewhere?”

“Of course,” she said. There was no need to discuss it further.

I was just about to haul another box of ancient garbage down the pull-down ladder Frank had installed, one of his many home improvements when he moved in, when I noticed something. On the side of the box was something that looked like a fishhook, but from a different angle, a J. I tore into the box, tossing aside a pile of
crumbling
Woman's Day
magazines and some recipe cards in Mom's handwriting. I was beginning to wonder if maybe the symbol on the side of the box really was just a fishhook when I noticed a tiny black address book. I grabbed it and flipped through it. Each page was crammed with addresses of relatives in West Virginia and North Carolina, and a lot of names I didn't recognize. There was a John Babcock in Pennsylvania, and at first I got really excited, but then I remembered he was Cousin Velma's ex-husband. There was another J. in the D's, but when I looked at it more carefully, I realized it was Joelle Duckworth, one of my mother's friends from high school.

But when I got to the F's, there it was. The minute I saw it, I knew it was
my
J. There was an address in Flagstaff, Arizona, and there in Mom's handwriting, the name “J. Fallingwater.”

***

Even Pam was more or less convinced. “It does stand to reason,” she said slowly, looking at the address. “I don't know who else she knew in Arizona. I don't remember her ever mentioning anyone. I wonder if that address is still good. Probably not, but you never know when she wrote it in there. You should write him a letter.”

“You think?” I breathed in and out carefully so my lungs wouldn't decide it would be fun to go into spasms.

“Sure, why not.”

“What would I say?”

“Don't tell him you're his long-lost daughter and you want to run a DNA test.”

“Okay, I won't lead with that.”

“Tell him you know he was a friend of Mom's and you want to let him know she passed away. If he answers, you can try to find out more about him and figure out if he's the guy who wrote the letters.”

“But I don't want to be the one to break it to him. You know who's really good at that kind of thing?”

“Who?” Pam said. She knew who. She tried to hand me the address book.

I shoved it back at her.

“Julie, I'm way too busy right now.”

“But you're such a good letter-writer.”

“Sorry, no. Really. I can't.” She stuck the address book in my hand and hurried out of the room. I ran after her.

It took another fifteen minutes of begging, but same as with everyone else in my family, there was no part of “no” I understood. She drove a hard bargain, and I had to promise to mow the lawn, repaint the porch, and scrub the rubber strip on the fridge door with a toothbrush. I was ready to pick up the dog shit in the yard (there was plenty of it) with tweezers if I could get her to write to J. Fallingwater.

“I just don't want to get sucked into any craziness,” she said a while later as we carried garbage out to the street.

“Craziness?” I said as if I could not imagine such a thing.

“You've jumped to a conclusion based on nothing, and I don't want to encourage you.” She set a box of burnt-out light bulbs at the curb.

“Don't be so strident.” This was a word the state's attorney had used to describe her, so we always threw it in her face if we could. “You're just writing a letter to your mother's old friend. It's the polite thing to do.”

“Sure. And we're so fucking polite.” She scratched herself like an ape. “I think you used to be able to return these things for money.” She pointed to the old light bulbs, obviously trying to change the subject.

“I just recycled three big bags of S&H Green Stamps, whatever those were.”

“I think they belonged to Mammaw. We should be selling that shit on eBay.
People will buy anything.”

As we opened the screen door to the house, the dogs started barking like we hadn't just been there a second ago. I thought of taking them for a walk, but as far as I knew, there was nowhere to go any more. I could put them in the car and take them down the street for a latte, but that was about it.

“You just have to drop him a line. I'll take it from there.”

“Where will you take it?”

“I don't know.” I really had no idea what I should do at this point. I thought for a second about adopting Fallingwater as my last name, but that seemed awkward. “It's a weird, name, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Where do you think it's from?”

“Maybe it's one of those Ellis Island names that got translated weird. Pfallingwasser.”

“No, I don't think so.” I was getting an idea—and it was a big one. It was so powerful that I started to actually hear a buzzing in my ears, like a swarm of ideas had suddenly flown into the empty hive of my brain. “Think about it. Arizona. The southwest.”

“And?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“What?”

“Arizona. The southwest. Who lives there?”

“I don't know, who?”

As I stood in our familiar living room, I felt myself growing taller. All the furniture seemed to be shrinking. The dogs dashed over and bowed down at my feet as if they sensed something important was going on. “Pam, it all suddenly makes sense.
You know how I've never felt—” I couldn't think of how to say it.