9 Letters (8 page)

To be honest, I never expected
I’d hear back from the bar again, but I got a call the next day
and afterward I shadowed Maggie at work for a few weeks and got
myself hired, as simple as that.

But now I was driving back from
the animal shelter with Rae’s number in my phone, and I’d
just told Maggie I wasn’t going out with her last night. My
life was on a new track, and the last thing I needed was to roll
right from one girl to the next. Wouldn’t be fair to Maggie,
wouldn’t be fair to me. Wouldn’t be fair to Rae.

I had her number in my phone, but
I wasn’t going to call her. Maybe if I needed something for
King. But maybe not even then...maybe I’d call the shelter
direct and ask someone else. Anyone else but Rae.

I wasn’t going to call her.

I’d keep the number in
case, though.

It’s all the petty stuff
you remember. Like, I know what kind of lip balm to buy Emily. I
can’t walk through the store without seeing it, too. They keep
it right by the checkout aisle, half the time. Takes everything I
have to keep my eyes away from the little yellow tins with their red
lettering. To keep from grabbing one and tossing it in my basket by
force of habit.

It’s funny. I held up
alright when her birthday rolled around, almost six months after she
died—I didn’t hold up great great, but I help up
alright—but sometimes I see cherry lip balm and it’s like
she’s waiting for me at home, except she’s not and she
never will be again.

That’s why I barely hit the
drive-through anymore. I always hated drive-through, I liked eating
in. Even if I was just getting fast food, it felt better to park and
go in and get ourselves a table and eat a damn burger at the table.
But Emily, she insisted, and half the time I gave in. When we first
got together, I asked her why, and she said “because.”
Which, when you first get together with an astounding girl like that,
“because” is enough reason.

But sometime after we got
married, probably a month or so after, we were at Mickey D’s,
which ain’t my favorite but sometimes it’s where you go,
and she told me why she liked the drive-through.

“I just like watching you
drive. I like sitting shotgun and eating while you drive. It’s
not ‘cause I’m in a hurry most often, it’s that I
feel all happy with my feet up on your dash. Reminds me of being
little, my momma driving us somewhere and getting us fast food. So if
I’m going to eat fast food, I like eating it in the truck.”

Which is why I never went through
the drive-through anymore. Hadn’t since she’d died.

But I had King and I had those
letters waiting at home and dammit I was supposed to be getting
better so I’d best act like it. I stopped at BK for a burger on
my way home from the shelter, and I went through the drive-through
and it wasn’t a big deal.

That’s one of the only
things my dad told me about grief. He said that it’s the
anticipation of pain that’s worse than the pain. You just do
the damn thing, and no matter how bad it is, it’s not as bad as
it hurts just thinking it over.

But my mom’s still alive
and they’re still married. Sure, Dad lost his brother in
Afghanistan, but losing a brother is like losing a limb. Losing your
wife is like losing your whole future, present, and half your past. I
think Dad knew that, that’s why he never said much.

He was right about anticipation.
It wasn’t a thing, going through that drive-through. I got onto
the freeway, picking at my fries with one hand, the other on the
wheel. King brought his head in the window, I think he smelled the
burger.

“Here you go, boy,” I
said, and gave him a fry. He ate it, content, got his head back out
the window.

Emotion didn’t hit me when
I was picking up the food. It hit me when I got home, instead. It hit
me when I sat down at the table, put a plate under my fast food
burger, and bit into it.

It’s the petty things you
remember.

Emily ate her meat well-done. I’d
never in my life met someone as country as her who ate her meat
well-done. The first couple years, she hadn’t told me, she’d
just ate it bloody like I like it. Then one day, we’d been at
her momma’s place while her momma was out of town, and Emily
was cooking us burgers, and she sprung it on me.

“We’re going to be
together for awhile,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. I’d
been out of school a year, working with my dad. Emily was a junior
still. “I sure like to think that.”

“We might be together
forever,” she said, and I was all happy inside at that, though
I didn’t let it show. Took me a long time to let things like
that show.

“I’d like that,”
I said carefully, not sure I was ready to discuss our relationship in
such concrete terms just yet, even if it made me happy to think about
a forever with her.

“Alright so here’s
the deal, I like my steak and burgers cooked through to rubber.”

That sure threw me. “What?”

Emily just crossed her arms and
gave me that stubborn look of hers. “Can’t stand the
taste of blood. Don’t know what it is about it. Makes me gag a
little. Don’t like any pink in my meat. If this is for real,
you and me, you’ve gotta know that.”

I didn’t laugh. Didn’t
even smile. Just nodded my head slowly. “All this time? But…”

“People are like to make
fun of me about it,” she said. “So I usually don’t
say nothing.”

“Alright,” I said.
“Now I know.” And then I did smile, and she smiled right
back.

I’d always assumed she was
a picky eater, or just watching her figure or something, how much
meat she left on the plate. But after she started cooking more to her
taste, she’d wolf it down faster than me. Never put much weight
on either, except maybe some muscle. Not that I would have minded.
God made all kinds of pretty women in all kinds of bodies.

So I’d known it, when she’d
lost her appetite for real. We were married by then, living together.
She’d tried to hide it. She had all kind of tricks. It’s
crazy how you can stir up a plate to make it look like you’ve
eaten more than you have. But she’d never let a scrap of
charred meat stay on her plate, as long as I’d known her. Until
a year before the end.

I didn’t know what was
wrong, though, because I’m an idiot. I thought maybe she was
sad, or anxious. Stressed. Unhappy with me. Me and Juan at the flower
shop got to know each other, because I was in there almost every day
on my way home from work. I never came home late, either, not if I
could help it. Pissed my dad right off, the days I worked with him
instead of for myself, how I’d pack away my tools right at five
and head for home. It’s not what you do when you’re doing
construction, he’d say. It’s not what you do when you’re
starting your own business, he’d say. It
is
what you do, though, when your wife is upset and you love her more
than life itself and you want her to be happy. You show up on time
for every meal she cooks you.

She was sick, and she hadn’t
told me. Because we didn’t have insurance. We didn’t have
insurance because I was starting my own contractor business. So she
kept quiet about how much her stomach hurt, and she didn’t know
what was wrong. I could have noticed. I should have noticed. I could
have found regular work and gotten us insured. I didn’t.

I failed her.

A man should know these things
about his wife.

I put my Burger King dinner back
down on the plate, half-eaten, as sobs tried their best to work their
way through my chest. My empty house. My empty heart.

To hell with that. Don’t
cry, don’t give in. Toughen up.

Three deep breaths. Works
sometimes for anger, works sometimes for sorrow.

Not this time.

I cleaned for an hour or so after
dinner. Still wasn’t done, not by a long shot, but the place
looked about as bad as before King tore it up. I’d done a lot
of the specifics from the letter—my old clothes were back in a
bag in the bed of my truck, waiting for me to donate them, and I’d
done the dishes and boxed up half of them, put them in the garage in
case the house was ever full again. Tried not to think too hard about
when that might happen, how it probably never would.

It was time for the third letter.
I sat down at the table, set out the envelopes. Two of them were
open, on my left. Seven remained, on my right. I pulled out my
folding knife, carefully opened the third. It wasn’t as hard
the third time, opening the envelope. Not quite as hard, not quite as
overwhelmingly magical. Just another step on the road to recovery. A
good step, a comfortable step. Still, I took a shot of whiskey to
steel my nerves. Courage comes in many forms, some of them liquid.

“Well, my love,” it
started out, “your house is cleaner and it’s not empty
anymore. There’s a big metal food bowl and a big metal water
bowl out in the kitchen and I hope you love that mutt enough to let
him into bed with you. I’m so proud of you, Luke. But this next
part is going to be harder.

“I want you to tune your
guitar. You tell everyone you’re tough, and you are, but deep
down you’re a big softie and I bet you haven’t been
playing because you remember how much I loved hearing you play.”

Emily did, in fact, know me
better than I knew myself. I hadn’t even thought about why I
wasn’t playing anymore, but it was that. Mostly that. Also that
a guitar is a good way to let out emotions. I was having enough
trouble keeping mine in.

“I really, really loved the
way you were when you played music. Not just your music itself, but
the way you were. You open up when the words come out of you. You let
the world in, and you’re a strong man already but it makes you
even stronger. So tune up your guitar. Maybe get new strings if
you’ve got to. Practice. Get those callouses back.”

It wasn’t just my guitar
callouses I’d lost in the last year.

“I’ve got two first
memories of hearing you play guitar. The first time, the real first
time, you didn’t know I was there. It was after school one day.
I think you were waiting on practice. You were sitting in the back of
your daddy’s pickup and you were picking at the strings and
playing something I’ve never heard you play since. You weren’t
singing, just kind of humming along. Maybe you made it up just then.
Maybe it’s a tune that’s never been played before and
will never be played again. And I was walking up through the parking
lot, the next row over, and you didn’t see me, because you had
your head down over your guitar, so I leaned up against the next car
over and listened. I’d already kissed you, but that was the
first time I felt like I had a taste, a real taste, of your soul. Of
who you are to God. Of the best of you.”

I’d been trying to write
her a love song. I hadn’t been waiting on practice, practice
had been waiting on me. Every day for weeks, I’d tried to write
her that song for a couple minutes every day before practice. Given
up, eventually. I hadn’t thought about that song in years.

“Then there was the first
time you played for me. You played me Johnny Cash, because you knew I
loved outlaw country, and you knew you couldn’t go wrong with
‘Give My Love to Rose.’ We were sitting on top of the cab
in the parking lot of, I don’t know, I think CVS, and there you
were with your hat on backwards and the sun on your face and you sang
to me like I was the only person in the world. Never told you this
either, but that’s when I knew I was in love with you. Because
love isn’t a one-way thing. Love is a relationship between two
people. I knew how I felt already, but I didn’t know it was
love until I heard you play and I knew you loved me too.”

I thought I’d been too
chicken to tell her I loved her for another six months still, because
the first time I said it aloud was that next Christmas, my senior
year, after we’d eaten dinner with my family and I realized I
wanted her as my family more than I wanted anything else in the
world. But it turns out, I’d told her already.

“So that’s all.
Just...play your guitar.”

I read the letter over once more,
wiped my eyes with my sleeve, and then folded the paper up and put it
back in the envelope. Onto the left hand side of the table. Three
read, six remaining.

“Hey King,” I said,
when I finally felt like I could speak. The dog looked up from where
he was lying near the door. “Where the hell’s my guitar?”

I hadn’t seen it while I
was cleaning, which meant it was in the garage.

The garage had been a mess since
before we’d moved in, because my granddad hadn’t ever
really bothered cleaning the place out. But my Gibson acoustic was
where I must have left it in the corner, in its case on top of a pile
of junk. A pick was still stuck between the strings, the capo still
clipped onto the head. The high E was busted—that was probably
why I’d put it away. I’d probably been too lazy to put on
new strings, even though there was a complete set in the case next to
the tuner.

I brought the Gibson inside,
along with the strings and a pair of dykes. Sat down on the couch,
started going through and pulling off the old strings, putting on the
new ones. New strings are a pain in the ass. It takes a while for
them to hold a tune. But it’s got to be done, sometimes. I got
them wrapped around the pegs, snipped off the extra length, then
tuned the thing.

I had no idea what to play, so I
just started playing some chords. A-minor, now there’s a good
chord. Goes right into E major, D minor. No specific song, but it’s
all the songs, also. The same pattern builds up half the songs ever
written, but each one is unique. The same pattern built me up, but
I’m unique.

As soon as I got comfortable, the
thing fell out of tune. New strings. I retuned it, went back to
playing.

My callouses were long gone, but
I pushed past where my fingers hurt and kept playing. Started playing
some country, some folk. Started to sing a little, cautiously. Kept
retuning.