Her voice had the specific quality of someone who had been crying and was now in the adjacent state to crying, past the grief part and into the part that was something else.
I said: good evening, Kelsey.
She said: how could you send that? On my wedding week?
I said: it’s a wedding gift.
She said: it’s not a gift. It’s an attack.
I said: I sent you a letter. Some photographs. Copies of pages from my grandmother’s journal. And a dried flower from her garden.
She said: the journal. You had no right.
I said: it’s my grandmother’s journal. I have every right.
She said: what she wrote about you. What she wrote about the house.
I said: yes.
She said: the flower.
I said: yes.
I waited.
She said: she described it. In the journal. The rose. The one on the south fence.
I said: yes.
She said: and then you put the flower in the box.
I said: yes.
She said: so I would understand.
I said: yes.
She said: you can’t do that. You can’t make me feel.
She stopped.
I said: I can’t make you feel anything, Kelsey. I sent you information. What you do with it is yours.
She said: I pulled out those flowers without thinking.
I said: yes.
She said: I didn’t know.
I said: that’s different from I’m sorry.
She was quiet.
I said: the garden was planted in 1982. Frances tended it every summer for forty years. It was not just flowers. It was the specific choices of a specific person over four decades.
I said: you ripped it out to decorate an arch.
She said: I didn’t think.
I said: no.
She said: I was under so much stress. With the venue falling through. I was just trying to make the wedding beautiful.
I said: I understand that.
I said: and the house was beautiful to begin with. That was the whole reason you wanted it.
