She shook her head. “I think I’m attached to it now, but that’s very nice of you.” Just as Laurie was starting to consider taking the breath that might have been exhaled in the form of the words “do you” and “want to have lunch sometime,” Matt the Grim Reaper got up and shook her hand.
“Okay,” he said. “I think we’re about all set for now. You just let me know when you’re done here, and I’ll take the rest of your sale pieces and schedule the donation and disposal pickups. Will that work?”
She said that it would, of course it would; what else was she going to say? “I’m not ready for you to leave yet because I enjoy the crinkles around your eyes, so please reschedule the truck that’s retrieving my great-aunt’s furniture”？ So yes, the answer was yes, that would work. “Sure.” They shook hands again, and she signed some more paperwork, and he set off in his truck. When he was gone, Laurie turned to June. “I may be out of practice.”
“Not at all,” June said. “It was wildly hot, that polite handshake. I felt like I shouldn’t be watching.”
* * *
—
They puttered around for a bit, and then Laurie and June went out to dinner. They had fried fish and shrimp and they tore pieces of bread off a big loaf, and there was a responsible amount of white wine and more talk about the Grim Reaper. It wasn’t like Laurie didn’t have his number; she had his business card. She could still call. Laurie dropped June off on the way back to Dot’s, and they hugged goodbye.
Upstairs in Dot’s second bedroom, the one with the painting of the tall ships, Laurie sat with the box that said CORRESPONDENCE, SPECIAL. She wasn’t going to read the love letters. She wasn’t going to pry. But the work of the last few days had put a rock in the middle of her chest, made of obligations and frustrations, and it was reluctant to budge. She would skim one letter, just one, one from John—how scandalous could a letter from a chemist be, anyway?
She took the top off the box and flicked through envelopes until she saw one with a return address that said “J. Harlan.” The sender was in Bangor. When she slid the letter out of the envelope, the first thing she saw was the date: 7.14.73, with dots between the numbers. She immediately felt wrong even scanning it—she saw “miss you” and “can’t imagine” and “hard times” and “your smile.” She wasn’t just in Dot’s house; she was in a room from Dot’s life, she felt, where she shouldn’t be. Looking under the bed and behind the curtains and in the closets. It seemed wrong. She could tell, though, that this letter was written to a woman who was not happy. That year, 1973, would have been right around when Dot’s school had been consolidated with the one in the next town and she’d had to get another job. That part of the history Laurie did know, because that was when Dot moved from the business office at the elementary school over to the high school.
Laurie got to the last page, the second side of the third sheet of ivory paper, and looked for his signature. She wondered how it was signed. “Fondly”？ “Yours”？ “With burning desire”？ “Chemically”？
As it turned out, it was simply “With love.” It said, “With love, John.”
But what stopped Laurie was just above that. One sentence. A closing, offered with evident tenderness. It said, “And anyway, if you’re ever desperate, there are always ducks, darling.”
“Ducks,” Laurie muttered.
Chapter Three
In Dot’s jewelry box, there was a crowded charm bracelet with eighteen hearts dangling from it. Each one had a name on one side and a birth date on the other. Four were for her two nephews and two nieces, including Laurie’s mother, Barbara. Fourteen more, in a slightly newer style, were for their kids, including Laurie and her brothers.
Out of all those hearts, it was Laurie’s family that had stayed in Calcasset. They were the ones who saw the charms in person whenever Dot put on the bracelet at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Laurie carefully took off her charm with a tiny pair of pliers and slipped it into her box of keepsakes. After consulting with her mother, she removed the rest of the charms, too, and packed each into a tiny plastic sleeve, setting them aside to later be sent to the people whose birthdays they marked.
When Dot was still working, she had kept her travels to the summers. It was after she retired, when Laurie was twelve or thirteen, that she’d accelerated her adventures. She sailed on cruises, took trips with friends, took trips with “friends,” and went backpacking with tour groups and church groups. But there had also been plenty of journeys on her own, like the ones to Paris and Seville and Key West and Tokyo, filling her house with everything she could stuff into her suitcases. She lovingly lined it all up on shelves, in cabinets, on tables, and on windowsills, until her house sagged under the weight of everything she had managed to see.