Chapter 13
The envelope rode on the passenger seat with Gloria’s handwriting turned up where Emma could see it. Eight minutes of road lay between Simonton Street and Hibiscus Lane. She took fifteen and couldn’t have said afterward what she’d done with the other seven.
At a red light on Truman, she picked up the envelope and got as far as putting her thumb beneath the flap before the light changed. She set it down again.
Edmund had carried the letter for nearly a year. Emma could wait a few more minutes.
The cottage came into view around the last curve of the lane, pink and low behind the fence with bougainvillea spilling over the porch railing. Gloria’s lilies followed the fence in white, pink and yellow, and Jake’s truck was in the driveway.
Emma parked and picked up the envelope.
Jake was on the porch with a hose in one hand, watering the herb pots along the railing. He straightened when he saw her, and the smile that started on his face disappeared when he got a better look at hers.
“Hey.”
He watched her come up the path. “You okay?”
Emma held up the envelope.
“Edmund gave me a letter from my grandmother.”
Jake set down the hose.
“He told me to read it here at the kitchen table.”
“Then that’s where you should read it.”
“Would you mind?”
“Emma, it’s your house, go inside. I’ll be in the garden.”
Neither of them knew yet whether the cottage was legally hers. There were lawyers and judges and an original will sitting in a bank in Miami between Emma and that certainty, but Jake had said it without hesitation.
Your house.
“Thank you.”
He held the screen door open for her, and Emma stepped past him into the cottage.
The kitchen was small and bright, with a scrubbed wooden table beneath the window overlooking the herb garden.
A blue enamel kettle sat on the stove, and the row of hooks Jake had put up himself held mismatched mugs he’d collected at yard sales.
The old pine floor was worn darker near the doorway from decades of people walking through it.
Emma set the envelope on the table.
Behind her, the screen door opened and closed. Jake’s footsteps went down the porch steps, and a moment later she heard him turn on the hose in the back garden.
Emma pulled out the chair on the window side, and a memory came back so clearly that she put one hand on the chair before sitting down.
Gloria had always sat there because she liked looking out at the herbs.
Emma had sat across from her when she was eight, drawing pictures on the back of a supermarket flyer while Gloria cut an apple into slices and put them on a plate between them.
Emma couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about, but she remembered Gloria laughing.
Emma sat at the table, turned the envelope over, slid a finger beneath the flap and opened it.
The paper inside was heavy cream stationery, folded in thirds and covered on both sides in Gloria’s familiar handwriting. Emma flattened the pages against the table.
My Em,
If you’re reading this, then I’m gone, and Edmund is either sitting near you or has passed you this letter some other way. I hope you’re somewhere quiet. More than that, I hope you’re at the cottage and sitting at the kitchen table. I’d like to think you are.
Let me start with the practical part because I don’t want it hanging over everything else I want to say.
The cottage is yours. I want you to know that clearly.
I signed a will in Miami-Dade County, witnessed by two people who don’t know your uncle and notarized by a woman I picked out of the phone book.
The original is in a safe deposit box at Ocean National Bank on Brickell Avenue in Miami.
Your name is on the box. Edmund’s name is on it too, so he can go with you if he’s able.
If he isn’t, the bank has your name on file.
I also filed a copy of the will with the Monroe County property records and had it attached to the record for the cottage.
I wanted a second paper somewhere permanent in case the original was ever lost or hidden.
My hope is that you never need it, but I know enough to know that better two of a thing than none.
Now for the harder part.
I know my son. I have known him for sixty years, since the day the nurse handed him to me at Baptist Memorial and I looked at his little red face and loved him like I have loved almost nothing else on this earth.
I don’t want you to misunderstand what I did.
I did not stop loving Arthur, and I did not give up on him.
I loved him every day of his life, and I suppose I love him now, wherever love goes after we die.
But I saw him, Em. A mother can love a son and still see him clearly, and there came a time when I had to stop believing I could fix the parts of Arthur that he had no interest in fixing himself.
What I had left was the cottage.
It was my father’s before it was mine, and your father loved it from the time he was old enough to run barefoot across the porch. By the time you were three and I first put you in the porch swing with a bottle in your fist, I think some part of me already knew it would be yours one day.
I could have left it to Arthur and told myself that was what a mother was supposed to do. I also knew what would happen. He would sell it, the money would be gone before long, and there would be nothing left to show that any of us had spent a summer in that house.
I couldn’t do that.
I left Arthur other things. He has my mother’s china and the two pieces of jewelry that came from my father’s side, which he can sell or keep as he sees fit.
He has whatever is left in my savings after the medical bills, although it won’t be as much as he thinks.
I did not cut him out, and I don’t want you spending a minute of your life feeling guilty because I didn’t leave him the cottage.
The cottage was never meant for Arthur.
It was your father’s, and then it was yours.
Which brings me to what I most want to say to you and what I have been sitting with for a long time before I picked up this pen.
I have loved you like a daughter since the day your father died.
You were five years old and wearing a little blue dress Ruth had put you in that morning without knowing where the day would take you.
At the funeral, you climbed into my lap and put your head against my chest. You didn’t cry because you were five and didn’t yet understand what had happened.
I held you and thought, this child is going to be my second chance.
You have been, Em. You have been that in every way I could have hoped.
I have watched you grow into a woman I am proud of every day, and your father would have been proud of you too.
He would have been proud in the quiet way he did most things, and you got that from him.
He would have loved that you built a life for yourself in a city he never got to see.
He would have loved Priya, although I suspect the two of them would have teamed up against you whenever they thought you were working too much.
He would not have loved the seventy-hour weeks, and neither do I.
I’ll come back to that.
The cottage was your father’s before it was yours.
He learned to walk on the porch. When he was seven, he carved his initials into the underside of the railing, and I never had them sanded off because they made me smile every time I saw them.
They should still be there. Look on the underside of the railing on the east side of the porch, about a foot from the corner.
He loved that cottage, Em. If he had lived, he would have brought you down every summer of your childhood. I did the best I could in his place, and I know it wasn’t the same, but we had our summers, you and I.
They were something for me. I hope they were something for you too.
Now, about your work.
I’m not going to give you advice from beyond because your father would say that was undignified, but I am going to tell you what I see.
I have watched you make your life smaller so it would fit inside a job.
I did the same thing after your grandfather died, so I know what it looks like from the inside.
Work is safe when the rest of your life feels uncertain.
You know what will be asked of you, and you know you can do it well.
You can stay busy enough that no one asks how you are, including you.
Please don’t spend the rest of your life that way.
Come to the cottage. Sit on the porch. Grow something, even if you’re terrible at it. Learn the name of someone you don’t know yet. Have a laugh with a stranger and stay long enough to remember it afterward.
Your father would have hated to see you living the way you have been, and so do I. I love you too much to let this letter be my last chance to say it.
Edmund will bring you this letter if he is able, and if he isn’t, someone in his family will.
I want you to know that he is a good man.
He was the great surprise of my old age.
He read to me almost every night for eight years, argued with me about books when he should have known better, and made me laugh in a way I had forgotten I could laugh.
If you meet him, please trust him. He was kind to me in ways I did not know I still needed.
I don’t know how to end this. I have been sitting at my own kitchen table for an hour trying to come up with a good last sentence, and I don’t have one.
I love you, Em. I love you the way I loved your father, and I love you the way I have loved almost nothing else on this earth.
Come to the cottage. Sit in my chair and look out at the herbs. Know that I was here, and that I loved you every day.
Grandma
Emma reached the bottom of the last page, but she couldn’t see the words anymore.
She pressed the heels of both hands against her eyes as something she had been holding inside for a very long time finally came apart.