Part 3 — Raymonds Twenty Letters
Marjorie put the little brown-paper box in my hands, still tied with my red yarn. I knew the yarn because I had used it that autumn to wrap Maisies Christmas present, a hand-knit scarf with a glitter-tipped fringe. I had given it to Darren to carry to the house, and I had never seen Maisie wear it.
Inside the box was the scarf, folded and unworn, and underneath it a bundle of letters held with a rubber band. Marjorie said she had found them in Kyles den closet that morning while looking for wrapping paper. Her voice broke. She said she did not know until that moment that her son and Darren had been hiding anything.
The letters were from Raymond, twenty of them, one for each year since the courthouse. Every one was addressed to me and returned unopened, stamped with Darrens boyhood address. He had written on birthdays and on the anniversary of Stanleys death, and once on the day Darren graduated. They had never been delivered. Darren had stood at the mailbox for years and taken them out.
Raymond leaned on his cane at the foot of my steps and told me the rest. He had spent the first year after leaving in a hospital, the second in a program in Tulsa, and eighteen years sober. He carried his chip in his pocket. He said he had no right to ask for anything, and that he had only come because his grandchild had asked for him.
The truth about a person can sit in a closet for twenty years, tied up with the wrong ribbon.
Darren stood on the porch in the cold with his arms at his sides. He said he had been ashamed. He had told Kyle and his parents that I was fragile, that I needed quiet, and that I did not want to see anyone from his side of the family. He said he had been afraid that if his real father returned, I would see how much of the boy was still afraid.
I did not let him finish. I put my hand on his cheek, the way I did when he was nine. I told him he had never been a burden to me, not for a single day, and that Stanley had not adopted a problem but a son. Then I told him he would be telling Kyles parents every word of it at my table, on a plate I had paid for.
We ate on the holly china that afternoon, eight of us around my kitchen table. Raymond sat at the corner with his hat on his knee. Marjorie brought a pie. Kyle apologized for the laughing he had done on the porch, and Maisie slid under the table and held her great-grandfathers cane like a prize.
The payments stayed stopped, and I told Darren so plainly. But I set up a small college account for Maisie that no one could touch except her, and I told her parents they could not even look at the balance. She picked out the first deposit herself, a dime from her piggy bank, and I let her put it in with her own hand.
Raymond comes to Sunday supper now. He and I sit by Stanleys photograph and say very little. On New Years Day, Darren read aloud the first of the twenty letters in front of all of us, and when he reached the last line, which said only, Please tell Bernadine I am sorry, I said the one word that mattered. Yes.
