Flying Solo(9)

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They puttered around for a bit, and then Laurie and June went out to dinner. They had fried fish and shrimp and they tore pieces of bread off a big loaf, and there was a responsible amount of white wine and more talk about the Grim Reaper. It wasn’t like Laurie didn’t have his number; she had his business card. She could still call. Laurie dropped June off on the way back to Dot’s, and they hugged goodbye.

Upstairs in Dot’s second bedroom, the one with the painting of the tall ships, Laurie sat with the box that said CORRESPONDENCE, SPECIAL. She wasn’t going to read the love letters. She wasn’t going to pry. But the work of the last few days had put a rock in the middle of her chest, made of obligations and frustrations, and it was reluctant to budge. She would skim one letter, just one, one from John—how scandalous could a letter from a chemist be, anyway?

She took the top off the box and flicked through envelopes until she saw one with a return address that said “J. Harlan.” The sender was in Bangor. When she slid the letter out of the envelope, the first thing she saw was the date: 7.14.73, with dots between the numbers. She immediately felt wrong even scanning it—she saw “miss you” and “can’t imagine” and “hard times” and “your smile.” She wasn’t just in Dot’s house; she was in a room from Dot’s life, she felt, where she shouldn’t be. Looking under the bed and behind the curtains and in the closets. It seemed wrong. She could tell, though, that this letter was written to a woman who was not happy. That year, 1973, would have been right around when Dot’s school had been consolidated with the one in the next town and she’d had to get another job. That part of the history Laurie did know, because that was when Dot moved from the business office at the elementary school over to the high school.

Laurie got to the last page, the second side of the third sheet of ivory paper, and looked for his signature. She wondered how it was signed. “Fondly”? “Yours”? “With burning desire”? “Chemically”?

As it turned out, it was simply “With love.” It said, “With love, John.”

But what stopped Laurie was just above that. One sentence. A closing, offered with evident tenderness. It said, “And anyway, if you’re ever desperate, there are always ducks, darling.”

“Ducks,” Laurie muttered.





Chapter Three


In Dot’s jewelry box, there was a crowded charm bracelet with eighteen hearts dangling from it. Each one had a name on one side and a birth date on the other. Four were for her two nephews and two nieces, including Laurie’s mother, Barbara. Fourteen more, in a slightly newer style, were for their kids, including Laurie and her brothers.

Out of all those hearts, it was Laurie’s family that had stayed in Calcasset. They were the ones who saw the charms in person whenever Dot put on the bracelet at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Laurie carefully took off her charm with a tiny pair of pliers and slipped it into her box of keepsakes. After consulting with her mother, she removed the rest of the charms, too, and packed each into a tiny plastic sleeve, setting them aside to later be sent to the people whose birthdays they marked.

When Dot was still working, she had kept her travels to the summers. It was after she retired, when Laurie was twelve or thirteen, that she’d accelerated her adventures. She sailed on cruises, took trips with friends, took trips with “friends,” and went backpacking with tour groups and church groups. But there had also been plenty of journeys on her own, like the ones to Paris and Seville and Key West and Tokyo, filling her house with everything she could stuff into her suitcases. She lovingly lined it all up on shelves, in cabinets, on tables, and on windowsills, until her house sagged under the weight of everything she had managed to see.

Dot had died in November, and the air was sharply cold outside when she was buried next to her parents. After the funeral, Dot’s friend Martha from church had hosted a gathering at her house, and there were snacks and there was coffee, and people Laurie knew as well as people she didn’t know at all walked through and kissed her on the cheek. Then Laurie and her parents and her brothers had packed into the SUV her father, Dennis, had rented—with Laurie, as always, climbing all the way into the very back so she wouldn’t have to be compacted between her brothers. She hated to be compacted. They went back to Dot’s house and sat down around her dining room table. Barbara poured decaf, and Barbara and Dennis sat at the ends of the table. Laurie suspected they took some pleasure in the fact that all their children were in one place, which hardly ever happened anymore.

“We have some things we need to figure out,” Barbara had said. She explained as economically as she could that in Dot’s will, she—Barbara—was named as the executor. But they were estimating it would take at least six months for the estate to be probated so that they could clean out and sell the house, and Barbara, who was already skipping a lot of her regular activities because of hip pain, was rather inconveniently scheduled to have surgery right at the beginning of the summer. Dennis wasn’t doing much better, and not long after that, he had some long-delayed back surgery. It was just bad luck, that was all, but they had to figure out what they were going to do about the house.

Dot’s estate was to be divided up equally among her four nieces and nephews. The only real value, they figured, would lie in the house itself, which Dot had grown up in and inherited from her parents when they died. No one in the family was clamoring to live in it, and in order to sell it, they would have to empty it of ninety-plus years of Dot’s belongings, going back to her childhood. This job would probably land on the family around May or June. “It’s going to be a big job,” Barbara had said. “None of you has to do it, but nobody else in the family is going to do it. Most likely, our choices are to figure it out among the seven of us or to turn a lot of the work over to somebody we would pay. But we can pay somebody if we need to, so don’t worry about that.”