Chapter 8: The Letter He Did Not Send Yet
That night at the apartment Dad sat at the kitchen table after dinner and did not turn on the TV.
I was on the rug by the heater with my math worksheet spread out on the coffee table. My red dress was hung over the back of a chair and I was in my flannel pajamas. He had changed out of his blazer too, but he'd hung it on the back of his chair instead of the closet. The cream envelope was on the table beside a yellow legal pad.
He hadn't opened it since we left Grandma's. It had just been in his inside pocket, then on the counter, then on the table.
I pretended to work on the carrying problems while I watched him. He uncapped a pen, wrote a few lines, stopped, and read them back without moving his lips. Then he tore that sheet off and folded it in half and set it aside. He started again.
The apartment smelled like the soup he'd heated up and the radiator heat. It was quiet except for the pen and the heater clicking.
After the third try he leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He looked over at me.
"You don't have to watch me do homework too," he said.
I smiled a little. "I'm almost done."
He nodded and turned back to the pad. This time he wrote slower. I could see his handwriting from where I sat, slanting to the right, the way he always wrote. He didn't tear this one off. He kept going to the bottom of the page, then flipped it over and kept writing on the back.
When he finished he left the pad there and stood up to get water. I got up too and went to the table to look, like I was getting a drink as well.
The envelope was there up close. In his dark blue ink it said Mom & Dad in his same handwriting. Under that, their address. I hadn't seen the front before. My chest did a small tight thing when I read it.
"Is that for Grandma?" I asked.
He came back with two glasses and set one down for me. "Yeah. For both of them."
I touched the edge of the envelope but didn't pick it up. "Can I read it?"
"You can see the front," he said. "The inside I'm still getting right."
I looked at the legal pad again. I could only catch pieces upside down. Something about we will not be attending and seated as family and equal without qualifiers. My eyes stopped on that word. Equal.
He saw me looking.
"It's not fancy," he said. "It's just saying what I told you in the car. That we won't come to the next thing unless you're at the table like everyone else. No folding chair. No extra place. No waiting to see if there's room."
I held the envelope front with my fingertip. "Are you sure you want to send it like that?"
He didn't answer right away. He picked up the pen again and tapped it once against the pad.
"I was going to text your grandmother tonight," he said. "It would be faster. But faster makes it sound like I'm mad and then take it back later. I don't want her to think she can wait me out."
He pulled the envelope closer and slid the folded letter from the pad inside just to check the fit, then pulled it back out. He wasn't sealing it yet.
"So I'm going to take it there myself," he went on. "Or send it certified so someone signs for it. That way there's a record. No 'I didn't see your message' or 'you never said that.' It's not to be mean. It's to be clear."
I thought about Grandma smiling at the table the way she had when Dad stood up. I thought about how people had heard my dad say "Merry Christmas" and then watched us walk out. I felt that familiar pull to say it's okay, you don't have to do this for me.
"What if they get mad at me for it?" I asked. My voice was quiet.
Dad looked at me then, really looked. He put the pen down.
"Then they are not understanding the letter," he said. "This is my decision as your dad. Not yours. You didn't make me write it. I made a promise to you and I'm keeping it."
He picked up the letter again and read the last paragraph to himself, his lips moving just a little. He crossed out one sentence and wrote a shorter one above it. His hand was steady.
Then he folded the page cleanly in thirds, the way you fold a real letter, and slid it into the cream envelope. He ran his thumb along the crease. He sealed it, pressed it flat, and set it in the middle of the table where neither of us could miss it.
"We'll go in the morning," he said. "After I drop you at school I'll drive it over. That way you don't have to be there when they read it."
I nodded. The envelope sat there, sealed now, with Mom & Dad on the front in blue ink. It wasn't thick. It didn't need to be.
May you like
He reached over and turned my math worksheet toward him. "Come on. Let's finish these before bed so you don't have to think about this all night."
I sat back down on the rug and he sat on the floor beside me, and we did the last three problems together, with the sealed envelope right there on the table behind us waiting for morning.
