the war. I knew those careful letters because I had seen my father write the same way on every court paper and every Christmas card of my childhood. Edmund Dale. My father. But the words were not his, and I knew that too, the way you know a thing when the room goes quiet. I sat on the floor of the cedar room until the light turned from gray to gold. Then I climbed the stairs to the apartment and found the lawyer waiting at the kitchen table with a second white envelope. “She told me to give you this one after you opened the room,” he said.
Inside was a letter in Rosalind handwriting, as slanted and funny as her laugh. Catherine, honey, if you are reading this, I am finally out of excuses. The man in the book was Thomas Hale, a pilot from Ohio who came into the store the winter I turned twenty two. He could not write his own name. A German shell had taken the fingers of his right hand over the Rhine, and he was too proud to ask. So your father, his old friend from the army, wrote the note for him. Your father always did love a good secret.
Thomas promised to meet me at the bus station on the fourteenth of April, 1946, and take me to Ohio. I packed my suitcase. I waited five hours. He never came. I thought he had changed his mind, and my heart broke clean in two. My sister was getting married in June, so I put on a blue dress and stood next to her and smiled. Your mother did not know what I carried. I did not want to spoil her happiness. I opened a bookstore instead, and it kept me company. I would give anything to have that day back, and I would do it exactly the same.
The writer was my father, helping a wounded pilot named Thomas Hale, who sent my aunt a postcard every April fourteenth for seventy seven years.
On the fourteenth of April, 1947, a postcard came to the store. A picture of a bookshop in Cincinnati. No stamp I recognized, no name, only four words in the same stiff, taught left handed print: I am learning to write. I laughed until I cried. The next April came another postcard, and the next. Every one from a different bookshop, in a different town. Seventy seven postcards, honey. The hand got better each year. They are in the blue hatbox under my bed. I never knew where he lived. He never asked me to wait.
I closed the store each fourteenth because I wanted to be sitting in that room when the mail came. Foolish, I know. But a woman is allowed one foolish habit. I did not need him to come for me, Catherine. I needed to know he was alive and had learned to write. I think I was waiting for the word to arrive that he was happy. Last April, the postcard was not in his hand. It was a woman. She wrote that her father had passed away that winter and that he had asked her to keep sending them. The envelope smelled faintly of lavender and old paper, and I held it against my chest.
I found the hatbox. It was full of cards, bound in ribbon, and the last was dated that April, signed Anna Hale Morrow, Wexler Mills, Ohio, with a telephone number. I stared at it for two days. I am eighty one years old and I have never been brave about anything. But I thought of my aunt, a hundred and two, with a book on her chest, and I dialed. A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello?” she said. And I said, “This is Rosalind niece. I am calling about the postcards.”
Anna cried so hard that I cried, too, and we were two old women on a telephone, each apologizing for it. She told me her father became a schoolteacher in Wexler Mills. He raised four children and never spoke of the war. But every April fourteenth he sat at his kitchen table with a pen in his left hand and a postcard, and his wife, Ruth, who knew everything, would put the coffee beside him and kiss the top of his head. “Mama said that you gave him his handwriting,” Anna told me.
Two weeks later, Anna drove the whole way to Frankfort with her grown daughter, and they walked into Dale Books together, and the bell rang over the door as it has since 1946. They stood in front of the counter and cried. Then Anna set a small square package on it. Inside was the first postcard he ever tried to write, from 1946, a sheet of paper covered in crooked letters, practicing one sentence over and over: I will come for you. He did come, in his way. Every spring.
We spent the afternoon reading the postcards on the floor of the back room, the way I used to sit in the children section. Each one had a tiny picture of a bookstore in a town I had never visited, and a sentence or two about his year. The first said, I am learning to write. The twentieth said, my daughter was born. The fiftieth said only, still here. Anna read them in a quiet voice, and I realized my aunt had been given a love letter every spring that no one else in the world could see.
I did not sell the store, of course. It would be a sin. This spring I will open the back room on the fourteenth of April to anyone who wants to write a postcard, and I will read to the children on Saturdays in my silliest voices, just as she read to me. On the shelf in the cedar room, beside the worn paperback, I have put seventy eight postcards. The last one is from me. It says, Rosie, he came. We are fine. Thank you for the books. Every child who walks in gets a library card suggestion, and a story in a funny voice.
