9 Letters

by Austin, Blake

  “Hell, all my neighbors have been after me to give them your number.”

  Rebuilding her fence had gone better than I’d thought. When I’d first started building, once I had the basics down, I pretty much always finished what I started and made something functional. Sometimes even something beautiful. But that fence, that had been the first time I’d looked at an entire project, planned it out, and had its execution go exactly as I’d expected. I’d put up her fence quickly, easily. Hadn’t had to cut any corners, hadn’t had any problem sinking the posts. Everything that went wrong, I’d anticipated ahead of time, planned contingencies for. And it was a damn good fence.

  “I’m full up on work till spring, probably. I can only get about a day of work in a week, you know.”

  “Spring, you think?”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll have enough saved by then. Leave Warren’s, go back to full time contracting.”

  “That’s so exciting!” she said. “You’ll be your own boss again.”

  “How about you?” I asked. “How’s your plan?”

  “I had another stress dream about my application essay,” Rae said. “You know there’re only thirty veterinary schools in the country? And no shortage of applicants.”

  “Yeah, but you’re better than any of them. Smarter, too.”

  “Nice of you to say it.”

  “No, I mean it. So the main thing that’s standing in your way is an essay? You’ve got the undergrad degree, you’ve got the experience at the shelter. So it’s an essay. Rae, how many of those people applying are professional writers? I bet not too many of them other than you.”

  She blushed. It was cute the way she could blush.

  “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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  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 d
on’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

  Acknowledgments:

  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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