Throw away my future.
Make some reckless teenage decision.
“They told me if David came over before they spoke to you, I was supposed to send him away.”
“And you listened?”
Charlie rubbed both hands over his face.
“I told myself I was helping.”
“Helping who?”
He didn’t answer.
Then he said:
“David left something.”
My stomach dropped.
“What?”
“An envelope.”
I stopped breathing.
“Where is it?”
Charlie looked away.
“Charlie.”
“I was going to give it to you the next morning.”
“The fire happened.”
“Yes.”
“And afterward?”
“I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t?”
“You weren’t eating. You barely slept. Mom said anything about David leaving town would destroy you.”
I stared at him.
“So you kept it.”
“For a while.”
“How long is ‘a while’?”
His eyes filled.
“A week became a month.”
“And a month became forty-two years?”
He looked down.
“After enough time passed, telling you felt impossible.”
I almost laughed.
“Impossible for you.”
He nodded.
“Yes.”
Finally, something honest.
Charlie led me into his workshop.
He opened an old desk drawer.
Removed a wooden tray.
Then reached into the back.
When he turned around, he was holding a yellowed envelope.
My name was written across the front.
Laura.
David’s handwriting.
My hands shook as I took it.
The envelope had never been opened.
Inside was an acceptance letter.
David had been admitted to the training program.
There was also a handwritten page covered in calculations.
Tuition.
Expected wages.
Food.
Utilities.
Rent.
And at the bottom, in the same crooked handwriting I remembered from high school, he had written:
Still think we can afford the smallest apartment in America.
I laughed.
Then I started crying.
Forty-two years disappeared.
For one impossible moment, I was eighteen again, sitting on the hood of David’s car while he counted crumpled dollar bills.
Charlie stood behind me.
“I’m sorry.”
I turned around.
“You watched me believe he left this world without saying goodbye.”
“I know.”
“You had this.”
“I know.”
“For forty-two years.”
“I thought telling you later would only hurt you.”
“You did not get to decide that.”
His face crumpled.
“I know.”
“No.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t.”
He stared at me.
“You had a good life, Laura.”
That sentence made me angrier than anything else he had said.
“That isn’t the point.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“My good life doesn’t justify what you did.”
