The Secret Letters

by Abby Bardi

  “I know, I know.” She obviously didn’t want to argue about Brandon, since we’d pretty much forgotten him, though sometimes I still dreamed about him, dumb dreams where we were still married and had kids and were happy.

  I looked at my watch. I was going to be late to work again. Hector was probably talking to Milo about me right now. I told Pam I had to run, and to let me know if she found anything interesting. She promised she would.

  As I drove away, I could see Ricky and Star in the side yard, pressed together like Siamese twins as the dogs leaped around them.

  V

  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.”

  “D
on’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.

  VI

  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, l
ike 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.