Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Saylor
The letter has been in the drawer for over a week now.
Over a week of making coffee, standing at the counter, and not opening the drawer.
Nights of lying in bed knowing it's ten feet away, folded inside an envelope with no return address, sitting between a stack of takeout menus and a rubber band ball I've been growing since sophomore year.
I feel like it breathes in there.
Logically, I know it doesn't. Paper doesn't breathe, but the presence of it fills the apartment the way a sound does.
Low and constant, the hum of a refrigerator you stop hearing until someone turns it off.
Finally, I open the drawer.
The envelope is where I left it. Blocky capital letters. Blue ballpoint.
My name in his handwriting, which used to be on birthday cards and permission slips, and the note he left in my lunchbox in third grade that said ‘Have a good day, Sailor’ with the wrong spelling because he never could keep the a and the i straight.
I slide my finger under the flap and pull out two pages.
Lined paper, torn carefully from a legal pad. Both sides filled.
My hands are steady. I'm proud of them for it.
His writing is smaller than I remember. Cramped.
The letters lean to the right like they're in a hurry to get somewhere, and I wonder if handwriting changes in prison the way everything else does.
If the walls, the routine, and the fluorescent lights press even your penmanship into a tighter space.
The first paragraph is an apology.
Broad, practiced, built from the language of a man who's sat in group sessions and listened to counselors talk about accountability.
He's sorry for the pain he's caused. He's sorry for the years of silence, the distance, the choices that led to their separation.
Their separation. Like it was mutual. Like it was a thing they both did, a falling apart, a drifting.
Not a stabbing. Not a parking lot. Not thirty-two times.
He doesn't use those words. He doesn't use any words that would force him to see what he did in the resolution it deserves.
He calls it "that night." He calls it "what happened." He calls it "the worst mistake of my life."
A mistake is when you grab the wrong coffee order.
When you miss an exit on the highway.
You don't pick up a knife and drive it into a woman thirty-two times and call it a fucking mistake.
The second paragraph is about his program.
Therapy, group work, a mentor named Dale who's been helping him process his anger.
He's reading books. He's writing in a journal. He's finding clarity.
Clarity.
I read the word and feel my jaw lock.
The third paragraph is where it turns. Where it always turns, because men like my father can sustain the performance of remorse for exactly as long as it takes to reach the part they care about most.
I need you to know I was a good father to you, Sailor.
Whatever else happened, whatever I did, I loved you and your mother more than anything in this world.
I still do. That hasn't changed. I'm asking for a chance to show you I've changed, even if it's a letter back.
Even if it's one word. I need to know my daughter is okay.
I set the letter on the counter and stare at it.
He loved us more than anything in this world.
He loved us so much he put his hands on his girlfriend when she tried to leave him.
He loved us so much his anger issues drove my mother to file for divorce when I was eleven.
He loved us so much that a woman named Christine Pelletier is buried in East Oak Grove Cemetery because she told him she was done, and he decided she wasn't allowed to be.
Christine was thirty-four.
She taught second grade at Suncrest Elementary.
She had a daughter named Amina who was five years old and is now nineteen or twenty and living somewhere in this same town, carrying her own version of what my father did.
I know her name. I've always known it.
I looked her up once, on a night when the guilt was bad enough to make me stupid.
Found her Instagram. Scrolled through photos of a girl my age with her mother's smile and her mother's coloring and no posts older than fourteen years because everything before that belongs to a world where her mother existed.
I closed the app and didn't open it again.
The letter goes back in the drawer. I don't fold it, and I don't tear it up either.
Don't burn it, even though burning it would feel satisfying for about ten seconds before the smoke cleared and the words were still in my head.
I close the drawer and call my mom.
She picks up on the second ring. "Hey, baby."
"He wrote again." No pleasantries. She doesn't need them.
Silence on her end. Not surprised. She’s tired.
The exhale of a woman who's been waiting for this phone call the way you wait for a bill you know is coming.
"When?" Her voice is steady. Practiced, the same way his letter was practiced, except her steadiness is real. Earned through years of therapy and rebuilding, not performed for an audience of one.
I lean against the counter. "It came over a week ago. I opened it this morning."
"What did he say?"
"The same. He's in a program. He's found clarity." The word tastes sour. "He wants a chance. Wants to know I'm okay."
My mother's voice drops half a register. "He wants to know he's still connected to you. It's not about whether you're okay, Saylor. It's about whether he can still reach you."
She pauses. "If he can, he's not alone. If he can't, he has to sit with what he did, and he doesn't want to do that."
I close my eyes. Press my forehead against the cabinet above the counter.
The wood is cool and smooth and smells like the lemon cleaner I buy at the dollar store.
"He called himself a good father."
She's silent for a long time after that. Long enough for me to hear the clock on her kitchen wall ticking through the phone.
"Come over for dinner tonight." Not a question. An instruction.
"I have a shift at the bar."
"After."
"Mom, it'll be late."
"I don't care if it's five in the damn morning, Saylor." Her voice hardens at the edges. "Come over after your shift. Bring the letter if you want. Or don't."
She exhales. "Either way, you're not sitting alone with this."
My throat tightens. "Okay."
A pause. Then softer: "I love you. And I need you to hear this: you don't owe him a response. Not one word."
She takes a breath. "He lost the right to hear from you when he did what he did, and no amount of prison therapy and journal writing earns it back. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Good. Now go to class. Eat something." A cabinet closes on her end. "I'll have food ready for you tonight."
I hang up and stand in the kitchen for another minute, hands flat on the counter, staring at the closed drawer.
Then I grab my bag and leave.
* * *
The bar is called Pint House. It sits two blocks from campus on University Avenue, sandwiched between a vape shop and a laundromat.
The floor is sticky. The lighting is yellow. The jukebox hasn't worked since before I started.
I've been here eleven months. Wednesday through Saturday, five to close, four dollars above minimum wage plus tips.
Gary runs the place with the attentiveness of a man who won the bar in a divorce settlement and doesn't know what to do with it.
Tonight is Thursday, so it’s the usual mix.
College kids in WVU gear celebrating something or mourning something, hard to tell which because the drinking looks the same either way.
Construction workers at the end of the bar, boots still on, talking about a job site on Beechurst.
Marissa is working the other end, laughing too loud at a joke a frat boy made. She's good at this. The smiling, the leaning in, the casual touch on a forearm that doubles her tips.
I've never been able to do it. Never wanted to. I pour, I serve, I move.
Around nine, a man sits down at my section. Late thirties, maybe forty.
Baseball cap, flannel, hands like he works with them. He orders a Bud Light and a shot of Jameson.
I pour both and set them in front of him.
He drinks the shot, chases it with beer, orders another round. I pour it. He drinks it.
Orders a third.
By the fourth round, he's leaning forward on his elbows, watching me move behind the bar with an attention I can feel on my skin like a sunburn.
"You go to school here?" His voice is loose. Not slurring, but the consonants are starting to soften at the edges.
I set his beer down without making eye contact. "Yeah."
"What are you studying?"
"Social work."
He nods like this means something to him. Takes a pull of his beer. "My cousin's kid is at WVU. Business major. You know a Tyler Booth?"
"No."
He grins. "Good-looking kid. You'd remember him."
I move to the other end of the bar. Wipe down a section that doesn't need wiping. Help a girl with pink hair figure out which cider she wants.
When I come back, his glass is empty, and he's waving me over.
I pour another Bud Light and set it down.
His hand closes over mine on the glass.
Not aggressive. Not violent. His fingers wrap around my wrist and squeeze once, firm, the way you'd grip a doorknob to see if it turns.
"You don't smile much, do you?"
I pull my hand back. "Don't touch me."
He grins. Lifts his hands in mock surrender, palms out, still smiling like we're in on the same joke and I'm the one who hasn't figured out the punchline yet. "Relax. I'm being friendly."
"I said don't touch me."
The grin stays.
My skin is crawling. Not where he touched me. Everywhere.
The back of my neck, the inside of my elbows, the space behind my ears.
My body is running an alarm system I didn't install, wired into me by years of watching what happens when a man decides a woman's boundary is a suggestion.
I walk to the back office. Gary is on his phone, feet up on the desk, a bag of Doritos open in his lap.
"The guy at the end of the bar." I keep my voice level. "He grabbed my wrist."
Gary looks up. "Who, Keith?"
"I don't know his name. Baseball cap."
"Yeah, Keith." Gary brushes Dorito dust off his jeans. "He's a regular. He's harmless."
"He put his hand on me, Gary."