Chapter 11
Emma arrived at The Reading Room ten minutes early.
The bookstore sat halfway down a shaded block of Elizabeth Street in what looked as though it had once been someone’s home.
New hardcovers covered a table near the front door, and a woman with reading glasses was behind the coffee counter with a paperback open beside the register.
Emma ordered coffee she wasn’t sure she would drink and carried it through the doorway at the back.
The next room was lined with used books from floor to ceiling. The smell of old paper reminded her of the library Gloria used to take her to when she was a child, although here it was mixed with coffee and the faint dampness that seemed to settle into old buildings in Key West.
A second doorway opened onto a small walled garden.
Edmund was already there.
He sat at the corner table beneath an olive tree with a book open in front of him and a cup of black coffee near his hand.
He wore a pale linen jacket despite the warm morning, and Emma could see the effects of his recent illness in the thinness of his face and shoulders.
Still, he sat straight, his white hair neatly combed, and when he saw her, he closed the book and stood.
It took him a little effort.
Emma resisted the instinct to tell him he didn’t have to.
“Ms. Kendrick?”
“Yes.”
“Edmund Fairbanks. Thank you for coming.”
“I’m glad you wrote to me.”
“So am I. Please, sit.”
Emma took the chair across from him, and Edmund waited until she was settled before sitting again.
Up close, he looked older than she’d expected. His face was thin, but his gray eyes were clear and kind. A gold wedding band, worn nearly smooth with age, remained on his left hand.
Emma wondered whether it had belonged to the wife he’d lost before meeting Gloria.
Before she could decide what to say, Edmund studied her face.
“Your grandmother once told me you look exactly like your father. She said she never stopped being surprised by it.”
Emma lowered her coffee to the table.
Of all the things she had imagined Edmund might say, she hadn’t expected him to begin with her father.
“I only remember a few things from when I was little. I don’t really remember him.”
“She knew that. It troubled her sometimes, although she understood you were too young when he died. She hoped being at the cottage might bring some of him back to you. She used to say the house held him well.”
Emma looked down at her hands.
Only a few days earlier, she’d sat on the patio at Winslow’s thinking about her father and realizing that the cottage was one of the few places left where she could still imagine him. Now this man she’d never met was telling her Gloria had thought the same thing.
“She really said that?”
“Many times.”
Emma felt her eyes begin to water and blinked quickly.
“Thank you.”
“I’ve been waiting a long time to tell you things like that, so I’m going to try not to tell you all of them in the first ten minutes.”
Emma smiled.
“Would you like to ask me questions,” he asked, “or would you rather I talk?”
Emma didn’t have to think about it.
“How did you meet her?”
Edmund smiled again.
“I was hoping you’d ask me that.”
He turned the book on the table slightly before picking up his coffee.
“We lived in the same building in Miami. The mailboxes were in the lobby, a wall of small brass doors that should have been replaced twenty years before either of us got there. I picked up my mail every afternoon at four-thirty. Your grandmother picked hers up at four-fifteen.”
Emma smiled.
“For two years, we lived in the same building and missed each other by fifteen minutes every day. I always liked that part of the story. Two years and fifteen minutes.”
“What changed?”
“A package.”
Emma laughed softly.
“I was expecting one, so I went downstairs early. Gloria was standing at her mailbox fighting with the key. The locks were terrible. I’d learned that if you lifted the key slightly while you turned it, the lock would open.”
“So you rescued her mail.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I asked if I could try. She stepped aside, I opened the box and handed her the mail. She thanked me and told me her name. I told her mine.”
Edmund paused, and Emma waited.
“She asked if I had time for a cup of coffee upstairs.”
“And you did.”
He smiled, “I did. As it turned out, I had time for coffee upstairs for the next eight and a half years.”
Emma loved that and smiled.
“That was really it?”
“That was it. It was a Tuesday in September. Gloria had been widowed for six years, and I’d lost my wife eleven months earlier. Neither of us was looking for anyone, which may have been why it worked as well as it did.”
He looked toward the garden.
“It was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me, and I spent forty years teaching Classics. I made a career out of people doing surprising things.”
Emma laughed, and Edmund seemed pleased that she had.
“She was a wonderful woman,” he said. “I’m sure you know that.”
“I do.”
“Funny, too. Much funnier than people realized at first.”
Emma nodded. “She was.”
“She had very little patience for people who took themselves too seriously, although she could be remarkably patient with ordinary foolishness.”
“That sounds like her.”
Edmund smiled.
“She also had one of the most naturally thoughtful minds I ever knew. She never went to college, and I think part of her always regretted that. She didn’t talk about it often, but I knew.”
Emma hadn’t known.
The realization no longer surprised her as much as it might have yesterday. She was beginning to understand that there were entire parts of Gloria’s life she had never thought to ask about.
“We read together most evenings,” Edmund continued. “Sometimes I chose the book and sometimes she did. She read everything I gave her and usually had more interesting things to say about it than my students did.”
“What did she like?”
“Anne Tyler. Louise Erdrich. Willa Cather most of all. She read O Pioneers! three times while we were together.”
Emma looked at him.
“She’d read a passage and look at me over the top of the book and say, ‘This woman knew things.’”
A memory came back so clearly that she could see Gloria sitting on the cottage porch with a paperback open in her lap. Emma might have been eight or nine. She had come through the screen door carrying a glass of lemonade, and Gloria had looked up from the page.
This woman knew things.
Emma hadn’t remembered the book or even wondered who the woman was. She had remembered the words.
“She used to say that to me.”
Edmund’s expression softened.
“Did she?”
“When I was little. She’d sit on the porch and read while I was outside. I never knew what she was reading, but I remember her saying exactly that.”
Edmund looked close to tears. “I’m glad you remember.”
“So am I.”
Emma took a sip of the coffee she’d forgotten about.
“She read to me at the cottage too,” she said. “When I was little. I’m happy to know she did that with you, too.”
“We read to each other. It started because my eyes bothered me one evening, so Gloria took the book out of my hands and finished the chapter. After that, we took turns. Eventually it became what we did.”
Emma pictured them together without meaning to. Gloria in a chair with a book open, Edmund nearby listening. It was a life Emma had never seen, but for the first time she could imagine it.
For a while, neither of them spoke. Emma turned the coffee cup between her hands.
“There’s something I need to ask you.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you contact me sooner?”
Edmund lowered his eyes to his coffee.
“I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but I didn’t know you existed until the other day. I didn’t know any of this, and you said in your letter that you had something Gloria wanted me to have.”
“Yes.”
Emma waited.
“That is the question I most owe you an answer to,” he said. “Three weeks after your grandmother died, I collapsed in my daughter Rebecca’s kitchen. Congestive heart failure. It had been developing for some time, but I didn’t know it.”
Emma looked at his thin hands.
“I was in the hospital for a month and then in cardiac rehabilitation for another three. When I came home, I couldn’t walk upstairs without help. I couldn’t travel, and for a long time I couldn’t concentrate well enough to write the kind of letter I needed to write to you.”
“You don’t have to explain being sick. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you that.”
“I know, but I want you to understand. Gloria trusted me to do something, and for nearly a year I wasn’t able to do it.”
Emma thought about the letter he had sent yesterday. Even then he had apologized for the delay.
“Did Rebecca know?”
“That Gloria had left something with me for you? Yes. She knew. But Gloria had asked me to give it to you myself. Rebecca offered more than once to find you, and I kept telling her I would do it when I was well enough.”
“Why?”
Edmund considered the question.
“Because what your grandmother left isn’t something I thought should arrive in the mail from a stranger.”
Emma felt a small uneasiness return.
“What is it?”
“A letter.”
“From Gloria?”
“Yes.”
Emma sat back.
“She wrote it before she became ill. I’ve kept it all this time.”
“Have you read it?”
“No. I know some of what she wanted to tell you because we talked about it, but the letter was sealed when she gave it to me, and it’s still sealed.”
Emma looked toward the bookstore doorway.
Gloria had written her a letter.
She thought about the will Rachel had handed her the day before. Seeing Gloria’s signature had been emotional enough. This was different. A will had been written for lawyers and courts.
A letter had been written for her.
“When can I have it?”
“Tomorrow, if you’re willing.”
“Why not today?”
Edmund smiled slightly.
“Because I didn’t bring it.”
Emma laughed despite herself.
“I thought we should meet first. I also want to give it to you somewhere you can be alone with it afterward. Rebecca has a house on Simonton Street, and there’s a porch in the back that I’ve become very fond of. Besides, she wants to meet you.”
“Rebecca knew my grandmother?”