Chapter 3: The Shoebox
Linda was already in a back booth when I got there, in a black blazer, her red reading glasses hanging on their chain. A Nike shoebox sat on the table in front of her, the lid held on with two rubber bands.
She didn’t say hello. She slid it across.
“I didn’t know until Tuesday,” she said. “I swear to God, Tom. Thirty-four years I was married to that man. I didn’t know.”
I took off the rubber bands. Inside were letters, maybe forty of them, in envelopes and out. Most were on the lined yellow paper Diane used to buy in packs of twelve. I’d know her handwriting anywhere. The way she makes her capital T*s like little umbrellas. She’s written *Tom that way on thirty-five years of birthday cards.
The waitress came. Linda ordered two coffees without asking me.
I started reading.
The first one was from April 1989. It was what Diane had told me. Lonely, guilty, confused. What happened can’t happen again. Tom is a good man.
The second was from May. It happened again.
I read them in order. Linda had already sorted them by postmark. She was a bookkeeper; of course she had. The letters didn’t stop in the spring. They didn’t stop when I came home from Columbus.
September 1989: I keep telling myself I made the right choice.
Christmas 1989: Seeing you at Tom’s parents’ house was torture. You winked at me over the ham.
March 1990: He asked me to marry him. I said yes. I don’t know if I said it for the right reasons. Please don’t call the house.
I put that one down and pressed my fingertips against my eyes.
“Keep going,” Linda said softly. “I’m sorry. Keep going.”
There weren’t many more. A few in 1990, shorter, sadder, wavering between we have to stop and I think about you. Nothing suggested they’d been together physically after the engagement. Diane was careful about that. Every letter was careful, in its way, except about her feelings.
And Ray’s letters were there too. Linda had found Diane’s letters to Ray in his closet, but Ray had kept copies of his own, or drafts. Carbon paper. Of course. He worked at the insurance office then, and he took carbon paper home by the box.
His were shorter. I’ll wait. Whatever you decide.
The coffee went cold. Linda didn’t touch hers either.
At the next booth, a family was celebrating a birthday. Somebody’s grandmother sat there in a paper crown while they sang, off-key and happy. I held a letter my wife wrote before any of those grandkids were born, and I thought about how many birthdays Ray had sung at in my house, standing right behind me with a paper plate of cake.
“There’s one more,” she said. “At the bottom. Under the tissue paper. He kept that one separate.”
I lifted the folded tissue. Under it was a single envelope addressed in Diane’s handwriting to Ray’s old apartment on Brown Street. Postmarked from Dayton.
I unfolded the yellow page. It was only six lines long.
Ray —
I got your note. I can’t do what you’re asking. I can’t call it off. The invitations are out, his mother made the cake, and he looks at me like I’m the only person in the world. Maybe someday I’ll deserve that. Please stand up there and be his friend. Please don’t ever tell him.
— D.
At the top, in her umbrella capitals, she’d dated it the way she always does. Underlined twice.
June 6, 1991.
Our wedding was June 15, 1991.
Nine days.
I got your note. I can’t do what you’re asking.
Ray had asked her to call off our wedding. Nine days before he stood next to me at the altar and handed me her ring.
