Post Office I leave the car running and get out and walk up to the mail slot on the side of the building and drop it in. I close my eyes for a minute. Just a minute.
When I get back in Lindsay has turned on the radio and I smile at her for the first time in what seems like years. And I feel like a kid for the first time in years.
Do you mind if we go someplace? I ask her.
—Where?
—Do you mind?
—No.
So I drive up the Hudson to the beach I know, and there are little lights on the dry-docked boats, and a train whistles by in the distance. This is where I came the night I kissed you, I said. After Margo broke my taillight.
Why did you come here? she asks me.
I wanted to think about you some more, I say.
And I was avoiding my mother, I say, but I laugh, it’s a joke.
We talk for a very long time and I ask her if it gets easier and she says not really, just different, a different duller kind of hurt, the kind that doesn’t surprise you anymore. I ask what her parents were like when it happened and she says they have never been the same. We fought all the time for two years after it happened, she says. But not so much anymore.
After a while I turn the car off so we don’t waste gas and it’s so warm that we fall asleep there, facing the boats and the dark river.
I dream of many things, among them the old man who helped me and my mother get to the World Series, the old man from Pennsylvania who, years ago, paid for our car to be towed. I think of him when I need relief, when I need to feel that the world is not after all very bad. In my dream he is driving in his truck with my mother beside him. They are singing along to the radio. They’re smiling. I am there and not there. I am outside and they are in.
When I wake up I am shivering with cold. I look to my right and Lindsay is crying. She pushes her forehead into my shoulder like a child and says, I miss him. Oh. I miss him.
Dear Arthur Opp,
My name is Kel Keller. But my real name is Arthur Turner Keller. I think you know my mother Charlene Turner Keller. I am sorry to tell you this, but she has died.
I am very sorry to be the one to tell you, in a letter.
Why am I writing to you, you might be wondering. It is because of something she wrote to me actually. I have enclosed her last letter to me. It is important that you have it. You will see why.
I have put my address and my phone number on this envelope. I hope that you will be in touch with me if she was telling the truth. Which I don’t know if she was. She wasn’t well when she died. Or for a lot of her, most of her, life.
Yours truly,
Arthur “Kel” Keller
• • •
I did not see the letter until a day after it came. Since Charlene died, & since Yolanda left, I had not been checking my mail as eagerly as I once checked it. It seemed to me that everything that happened this extraordinary autumn was over & done with & I was finished hoping for more. The mailman came every day and pushed the mail through the slot & I let it sit there. If I walked by it I’d pick it up. But since it was always junk, I usually let it lie.
Then on Wednesday I mustered up some effort and scooped up the whole pile & began the nasty process of sorting. When I came across his letter I put everything else down.
The letter was written in three different hands. My address, and the return address, were written on the envelope in very neat proper handwriting. The first page that I pulled out was written in a boy’s messy handwriting. And the second and third pages were written by Charlene. O I’d recognize her handwriting anyplace.
Now. What the letter said I am still repeating in my head. Over & over again like a mantra. I must have read it thirty times in utter astonishment. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t gone mad.
My first reaction—I am weak—was to take the blessing that had been