9 Letters (2 page)

“Come on,” Jake said,
as we both wheeled kegs into the brightly-lit, not-yet-open bar.
“You’ve got to give us
something
.
She shave? I bet she shaves.”

Again: he didn’t
usually
pry.

“Leave him alone,”
John Lawson said. John Lawson was a huge man, the kind of man who was
too big to be known by just his first name. A hundred and fifty years
back, he would have been a frontiersman, the kind of man who could
have picked up an axe and scared off bears and bandits both. He still
carried that air about him, and it kept even the worst drunks in
line.

“I didn’t mean
nothing by it,” Jake said.

“His wife died I think a
year ago today,” John Lawson said. He turned to me. “That
right?”

“Must have got her mixed up
with some other Emily Cawley,” I said. “Don’t know
what you’re talking about.” I turned away. I really
didn’t want to think about it, and I really, really didn’t
want to talk about it.

Jake whistled. “I’m
sorry,” he said. “You doing alright?”

I got the keg down, hooked it up
to the tap. It was some kind of IPA. Half our damn beers were IPAs.

“What’s the point of
9.2% beer?” I asked. “I mean, seriously. If I want
whiskey I’ll drink whiskey. If I want to drink a beer, that’s
why God gave us lagers.”

Warren’s was an alright
bar. It was still blue-collar enough for Warren to have just named
the place after himself, but sometimes I was convinced that was just
to hide how upscale we were. I didn’t love the kind of crowd we
catered to. The slumming white collar, the people who wanted to feel
like they were drinking in a place with a name like ‘Warren’s’
but still get their microbrews on tap. Which meant a bartender like
me, I was part of the draw. Shit, I’d sold out without the cash
to back it up. At least Warren was a good guy, a straight-shooting
kind of guy.

I poured myself a Miller Lite and
got half of it down, then slammed the glass on the bar and headed out
the door, back to the truck. Work to do, no time to waste talking.

I was maybe moving some boxes of
limes a little too hard, because one of the boxes busted open on the
pavement and a few of the limes started rolling off down the
sidewalk, fell off the curb and landed in the gutter. Like me, I
guess—in the gutter. John Lawson and Jake were just watching me
from the door.

Emily loved lime on everything.
She loved lime in Mexican food and Blue Moon and margaritas. Pretty
much anything you could feasibly justify putting lime on, she put
lime on. She said she got it from growing up in the rodeo. Seeing
those limes in the street broke something in me.

I pulled back my foot to kick the
hell out of that box, just to shake the rest of the fruit free, just
to let it spill out all over the street. I’d never been an
angry man. I’d never been like my dad or my brother. I didn’t
want to become an angry man, either. But I had an awful lot to be
angry about.

I kicked the ground instead.
Looked up at the bright blue sky that definitely did not in any way
remind me of Emily’s bright blue eyes, and I counted my
breaths, up to ten, which was definitely not a technique Emily had
taught me—another thing she learned from the rodeo, actually. I
cleared my throat a few times and put the limes back in the box.
Because it’s what you do when you’re a grown-ass man. You
put the limes back in the box.

John Lawson came over and took
the box from me once I was done, and he had that box under one
gigantic arm and he put the other one affectionately on my shoulder.

“It’s alright,”
he said.

“The hell it is,” I
said, and I snapped, and I pushed him. The biggest man I know, the
bouncer at my bar, and I got both my palms up against his chest and
planted my feet into the ground and shoved him with all my strength.
He fell to the ground and the limes went rolling back off into the
gutter. For a moment we all just waited. I didn’t even know
what I’d do next.

Finally I let out the breath I’d
been holding and held out my hand to help him up, but John Lawson
just looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life,
which is fair enough I guess. Jake ran inside, came back out with
Warren, my boss.

“I’m going to call
Maggie in instead, Luke,” he said. Despite the drawl, Warren
had a voice that didn’t mess around—steel underneath, all
the way. He always had that voice, but he had it especially just
then. “Go home. Take a couple days. I know you need more than
that, but a couple days is what I can give you. I’ll see you
Wednesday and we’ll go from there, alright?”

“Yeah,” I said, or
maybe I mumbled it, or maybe I just thought it.

If I lost my job, I wouldn’t
lose my house. I owned the house. But I needed to eat. I needed
something to do. And I needed to know that, maybe, someday, I could
start contracting again. Which meant I couldn’t be broke. Even
if, yeah, maybe sometimes I wanted to get myself fired.

John Lawson was picking up the
limes, because he was a grown-ass man, and I just stormed off in the
after effects of a black fit of rage. There was a little storm cloud
over just my head and it was pissing rain and thunder and I knew to
the bottom of my soul that there was only one woman who could save
me. But that woman was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery South, and I
couldn’t quite say why I was alive and she wasn’t.

Even stepping up into my truck
did nothing for my mood, and I went home miserable.

The worst part about living alone
is how nothing ever changes when you’re away. Well, that’s
not the worst part about living alone, but it’s a strange thing
about it nonetheless. Everything was exactly how I’d left it,
because my house was lifeless and dead, because my wife wasn’t
around to make messes or tidy them up, to leave her shoes in the
doorway or her sweater draped over a chair...sometimes I think I’d
give anything to come home to one of those messes again.

As I walked to the door, my phone
was ringing. It was Natalie, Em’s older sister. We weren’t
on the best terms, but today of all days wasn’t the time to be
small. I answered.

“Hey Luke,” she said.
Her voice was so deep, so severe. The opposite of Emily’s.

“Hey,” I said.

“How’re you holding
up?”

I should have said something good
to her, probably. Told her I was doing alright, checked in to see how
she was doing. We could have played that game, the mutual reassurance
that everything is fine. We were both stubborn and tough. But I
didn’t want to play that game. I didn’t want to talk to
her at all. That tinge of accusation never seemed to leave her voice.

“How do you think?” I
asked, trying to keep myself from getting angry.

“I’m just checking
in,” she said. “It’s, you know.”

“Yeah, I goddamned know. I
know it’s the anniversary of my wife’s death.” So
much for keeping it under control. For a moment all I heard was air.
It wouldn’t have been the first time Natalie’d hung up on
me, deservedly. But then she spoke again, softly this time.

“She was my family too, you
know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We were silent on the phone for a
minute. I let out a long breath, debating an apology.

“Anyway. Talk to you
sometime,” Natalie said.

“Yeah,” I said. We
both hung up.

I opened the door and on the
floor there in front of me was that package I’d forgotten all
about from earlier. My name was scrawled across it in block capitals,
handwritten in marker. I didn’t know the handwriting.

The box was wrapped up in butcher
paper, and I took out a knife and cut it open clean and careful. I
lifted the lid and tried to make sense of the contents. Nine
envelopes, regular envelopes, with big numbers one through nine in
the upper right where a stamp would be. For a moment, my heart
stopped.

That handwriting, I knew. I
looked up, looked around the room, like someone was watching me. Like
there was a ghost in there with me or maybe some awful prank reality
TV show that just wanted to see me cry.

Emily.

Blood pounding in my ears, I went
and locked the deadbolt on the front door, couldn’t tell you
why. I cleared away all the accumulated junk on the kitchen table,
put everything away in its right place, then laid out the nine
envelopes. I didn’t know what was in them, but I knew I didn’t
want to rush. I knew, somehow, this was a moment to treasure, a
moment to linger on.

I sat down, felt the warm wood of
the chair beneath me, and cut open the top of the first envelope. I
closed my knife, clipped it back on my jeans pocket.

But my hand froze, the paper held
too tightly between my fingers. I couldn’t do it. Not yet.

I stood up, went to the liquor
cabinet, pulled out a shot glass and whiskey. I sat back down, took a
shot. Deep breath—nothing like the breaths I’d taken
earlier, staring at the sky—and I pulled out a letter from
Emily, one year dead.

“Luke,” it started.
If it’d said “Dear Luke,” I’d have thought it
a fraud. Emily had loved me with all her heart but she wasn’t a
city girl and didn’t wait much on formality.

“I’ve been dead a
year.”

My chest felt like it was caving
in, but I held back most of my tears and kept reading. I didn’t
sob, I didn’t cry, but a few tears welled up and drifted down
my cheek and fell on the paper.

“I think I’ve come to
know you better than I know myself. It’s strange to say that,
and stranger to mean it. Here I am at the end of my life, and I don’t
know who I am except in relation to you. And that makes me happy. It
makes me proud. There’s none of us who are alone in the world,
since God made every one of us, but you and I let our souls come
together and, well, I think I know you better than I know myself.

“I hope I’m wrong
about this, but I’ve got a feeling you’ve had a rough
year. I’ve got a feeling your life is falling apart. I’ve
got a feeling you blame yourself even though it’s God who
picked me to join Him.”

My breath hitched in my throat. I
wanted to argue with her, I realized. God had nothing to do with it.
Cancer killed her.

“So I’m writing you
these letters. There are eight of them.” She’d crossed
out the eight, written “nine” above it with lighter
strokes of the pen. “Someone’s got to help get you
through this, and you helped me through the worst stuff in my life,
so I think it’s fair if I try to do the same for you.”

I rested my head in my hands, my
elbows on the table, and tried to relax. Tried to master my breath as
I kept reading.

“Here’s the deal.
Each letter comes with instructions, a specific task. You can only
open the next letter when you finish doing what the last one says.
So, like, you can’t open number two until you get a dog.”

A dog?

“That’s your first
instruction. Go get a dog. Go out, right now, and rescue a dog.”

I looked over at the clock. It
was almost six. Assuming I’d remembered to set it forward for
daylight savings. I looked at my phone. Almost seven. There was no
way a rescue place was still going to be open.

“Remember, you don’t
pick the dog, the dog will pick you. I don’t care if you end up
with a pug, you let the dog pick you. Well, maybe don’t get a
pug, I can’t see you with a pug. But still. Go get a dog.”

Only Emily could get me laughing
at a time like that, but it worked. I was chuckling.

“I love you, but you know
that already, and here I am dying and all I can think is that you’ve
given me a better life than I could have hoped for. Too short, yes,
but an amazing life anyway. You’re the best man in the world,
the best husband in the world. I’ll tell you more sweet things
like that in the next letter, but you’re not allowed to read it
yet, okay? Not until you get a dog.”

She didn’t sign her name,
because of course she didn’t, because of course she didn’t
need to. My Emily.

I folded the letter up, put in
back in the envelope. Stared out the window at the little bit of the
world I could see under the streetlight outside. Then I took the
letter back out, read it over twice more. Folded it up, put it back
in the envelope.

A dog.

I can’t take care of a dog,
I can’t even take care of myself.

I’m not going to get a dog.

The next morning, I had my feet
up on the table and a bowl of Golden Grahams in my lap and the TV was
on. I was content enough, I guess. My can of Coke said “Edward”
on it, and “Jessica” was empty next to it. Never
understood that ad campaign, and every time I bought a case of cans I
had to worry I’d find an “Emily.” But Coke was Coke
and it goes well with cereal and TV.

I’d slept well the night
before, which honestly took me by surprise. I’d barely dreamt.
I’d been dreading the anniversary for months. But now it was
over. The worst was over.

Sort of.

There was a reality show about an
auto mechanic shop on the TV, and my cereal wasn’t soggy, and
my couch was pretty comfortable. I didn’t have to work for a
couple of days. I should shove bouncers more often.

Then the bowl was empty, and the
box was empty so I couldn’t pour another one. The show ended
and a worse one came on, about a tattoo parlor and all the bad ideas
people get etched on them for good. Tattoos were too much commitment.

Since when had I been afraid of
commitment?

Maybe I should get a dog.

I went over to the kitchen table,
found the letter I’d opened, brought it back over to the couch
and pulled it out to read it again. I did like dogs. Emily and I had
talked about rescuing one though, and it didn’t feel right to
get one without her. She’d wanted a dog as kind of like a
practice kid—something to take care of besides her husband and
a few house plants. But now? The last thing I needed was a practice
kid, and who knew if I’d be responsible enough to care for an
animal?