That is what I actually get out of it and I did not expect it at all. Abner Lachance has eleven seconds of my mother that nobody else alive has: he was the last person to see her face.
He has told me those eleven seconds exactly four times, and never voluntarily, and only when I ask.
She was singing.
Her window was cracked an inch in the rain, and she had music on loud enough that he heard four notes of it through it when he got out of the cab, and he has never known the song and I have played him eleven of hers and he has never picked it.
“She was happy,” he said. “That’s the only thing I can give you and I’ve never been sure whether it makes it better or worse.”
It makes it better.
I did not expect that either, and I have stopped trying to justify it: I would rather know that my mother was driving through rain with the window cracked, singing, than know nothing at all.
The letters are in my house now.
All forty-one, plus the two of Marlon’s I have — the one Abner kept, and the one he wrote me, which was not in the drawer at all.
That one was in the folder with his will, at the lawyer’s, and I did not read it until after I’d been to Abner’s, which I think he would have wanted, because it is only three lines long and it assumes I already know everything.
“Vera — if you’re reading this in the right order, you’ve seen the drawer and you’ve probably met him.
He isn’t a monster and I’d have gone under if he had been. I needed one person who was sorry about it as long as I was.
You were four and you were asleep before we got to the hospital. That’s all of it. I love you. — Dad.”
You were asleep before we got to the hospital.
Forty-one years, and the only detail he ever gave me himself is the one that says I did not suffer.
My daughter has started writing to him.
Abner, I mean. That was not my idea and I found out about it four months in, when he mentioned it on a Saturday as though I obviously knew.
“Your girl writes a nice letter.”
“She what?”
It turns out that after the trip last October she asked him for his address, and has sent him one a month since — about school, about a dog they do not have and she is campaigning for, about a history project on the 1980s for which she interviewed him for forty minutes on the phone.
He answers every one.
He keeps them in a shoebox. He showed me. It is not the same shoebox, and I noticed that he had bought a new one rather than use the old, and neither of us said anything about it.
“She’s eleven,” I said. “You don’t have to—”
“Vera.” He was very firm about it. “I have written a letter every October for forty-one years to a man who is now d*ed. Do you know what I have got, going into this winter?”
“What?”
“Twelve a year,” said Abner Lachance. “From a child who thinks I’m interesting.”
There is a shoe on my bookshelf.
Not in a box — on the shelf, red canvas, broken buckle, next to a framed photograph of a man at a school play holding a camera the wrong way round.
People ask about it.
I tell them my stepfather kept it for forty-one years in a garage drawer, and that it is the only thing I own from the night my mother d*ed, and that he never once showed it to me.
And when they ask why he didn’t, I say the truest thing I know, which took me two years and an eighty-one-year-old truck driver to arrive at.
He wasn’t hiding what happened to my mother.
He was holding it, so I wouldn’t have to, for as long as he could manage — and when he couldn’t manage any longer, he didn’t drop it.
He put it in a drawer and told one person where to point me.
Abner is eighty-three now.
He has a bad winter every year and this last one was worse, and he has told me, in the flat way of men of that generation, that he has “put things in order,” which I understand to mean an envelope in a drawer of his own.
I asked him what he wants done with the letters.
Marlon’s forty — the ones I have never read, the other half of that conversation, sitting eleven miles from my house in a box I have not asked to see.
“They’re yours when I go,” he said. “I’d rather you read them after.”
“Why after?”
