He asked after my rhubarb. That was the end of the conversation.
Where things are.
The shoebox is on top of the wardrobe in my mother’s room, which I still call my mother’s room.
The ring is in it. It is small and it is 1984 and it is not to my taste and I have not worn it and I am not going to.
And the last thing.
In the February I posted one.
Not to him. There is nowhere to post anything to him.
The 1986 card — the second one in the box, the year everything happened, the year of the letter — is the only one in the whole stack with anything written inside beyond a line.
Four pages. He wrote it in the November of 1986, five months after the wedding, three months after the letter, in a rented flat with a nine-month-old asleep in the next room.
It says all of it. The party, the September, the ring in the drawer, the four minutes at a kitchen table, the decision. Everything he took two hours and forty-one years to say to me in a hospital.
