“Can I help you?” A woman approaches from down the hall.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “The front door was open. Are you related to William?” I think perhaps she is the daughter William wrote of in his first letter to me.
“No. I’m his real estate agent.”
“I didn’t see a sign. Has the house sold?”
“Last weekend,” she says. “I took the sign down today. We had seven offers in two days, every one of them over the asking price.” Real estate inflation has come to Seattle, along with traffic. Good for William. She puts out her hand, which I shake. “I’m Dawn Richards,” she says. “Are you looking for a home in Issaquah?”
“No. I’m just visiting from California. I was hoping to find the owner, William Goodman. I knew him many years ago. Looks like I’m too late.”
“He had a motor home. He and his wife. She passed about two years ago. He fixed up the house, hired me to put it on the market, and took off. He left instructions to put his money into a bank account.”
I smile. “He didn’t say where he was going?”
“I don’t think he had any set plans. He signed the papers remotely on my company website, and I deposited the money into an account in town. How did you know William?”
“I worked with him almost forty years ago on a construction crew. I haven’t seen or talked to him since.”
She gives me a puzzled look, clearly intending to ask, Why, then, are you here?
“A couple years ago he sent me a letter, with a journal he kept while in Vietnam. I finished reading his journal and hoped to speak to him.”
She squints, as if having trouble believing my story. Then she says, “Did you say you live in California?”
“Yes.”
“Burlingame?”
“Yes,” I say, intrigued by where this is going.
“You’re not . . .” She pulls out a white envelope from her storage clipboard. “You’re not Vincenzo, are you?”
I laughed. “Vincent,” I say. “Vincent Bianco. Though William used to call me Vincenzo.”
She gives a soft chuckle, shaking her head as she hands me the envelope. “William asked me to mail this after I sold the house. This is really too strange.”
I recognize the same scribbled handwriting from the manila envelope sent to me almost exactly two years ago. As before, American flag stamps adorn the upper-right corner. As before, William did not provide a return address. “He asked you to mail this after the house sold?”
“Yes,” she says.
I pause. William didn’t want to talk about what he wrote in his journal. I can understand why. I’ve read a lot about Vietnam veterans, and what I’ve read is that many won’t talk about their experiences. There are many books, but most veterans keep to themselves.
“You look like you’re on your way out. I don’t want to keep you.”
“I have another showing. I have to lock up, but you’re welcome to sit on the swing or porch steps to read his letter, if you like.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’d like that.”
I step out onto the porch. Dawn Richards closes the front door and deadbolts it. It feels like she is closing a life lived. “Do you know anything about the people who bought the house?”
“A young family,” she says. “They’re moving out of Seattle and want more room, more land. They want to slow down and spend time with their children.”
I can imagine a young boy riding a bike in the yard, a young girl in a dress on a swing fastened to a limb of the oak tree. More Norman Rockwell paintings. My ideal of a bucolic existence, one without wars. One in which the family would walk into town to eat a meal, catch a performance at the local theater, and walk home again, the boy kicking a can. A life I could imagine from my youth. One not constantly interrupted by cell phones or social media. I have a thought and yell to Dawn Richards, who is just about to get into her car. “Did William leave a cell phone number?”
She looks up. “Not with me.”
“An email address?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
I smile and wave. Then I sit on the porch swing, and I think again of that Norman Rockwell painting. Now I’m in it. It is why I came to the Northwest, I suppose. I just wanted the chance to know that William is okay, that he’s led some semblance of a good life. Maybe that’s why William has left his home, taken to the road in his RV, so he can remember the good life he had here, with his wife, and won’t have to watch it deteriorate in his old age. Another family will have the chance at that bucolic existence.