PART 2 — One Line Back
“I’m in it?” I said. “Mom, I wasn’t born until 1986.”
“I know when you were born, Victor. I was there. I have the back problems to prove it.”
“Okay. Too much information.”
“You asked.” She almost smiled. Then it faded. “Let me do this in order. If I skip around, I’ll lose my nerve.”
I nodded.
“Henry did write back,” she said.
I want to be honest about something. I was rooting for him. I know that makes no sense. I had never met the man, and I already knew how the story ended for her.
“It took three weeks,” she said. “One page, folded in thirds. I read it standing at the mailbox.”
“What did it say?”
“He said no.”
She let that sit.
“He was kind about it. That was the worst part. He said he cared about me too much to be anyone’s secret, and too much to watch me turn into one.”
Now, I’m only repeating what she remembered. Sixty years is a long time to read the same page in your head. Words wear smooth.
“Do you still have it?”
“Victor, I have everything.” She tapped the folder. “That’s my whole problem. I never threw anything away. Not a ticket stub. Not a grudge.”
——————————
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“What women did in 1966. I went to church and I behaved.”
She went to St. Agnes every Sunday, and Wednesdays too. A priest named Father Doyle told her that missing a man who had left her was vanity, and missing him the way she did was something worse.
“I confessed things I hadn’t even done,” she said. “Just so I’d have something to say. By thirty, I had decided the safest th
ing was to stop wanting anything out loud.”
“And acting?”
“Acting stopped.” She shrugged one thin shoulder. “My father left debts. The theater closed in ’67. And I think I was afraid that if I ever stood on a stage again, I’d look out into the dark and see a man in a suit who wasn’t there.”
“So what did you do?”
“I drove a cab.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“Fifteen years,” she said, sitting up straighter. “Yellow Cab, Dayton. Best audience I ever had.”
“Mom, you were a taxi driver?”
“A new audience every fifteen minutes. And every single one of them believed they were riding with a woman who was fine.”
She looked at me.
“That’s acting, Victor. Better than anything I did as Cleopatra.”
——————————
“Then your father got in my cab.”
I should explain. My father, Raymond Wagner, lives in Phoenix. He sends me a birthday card every year with a twenty-dollar bill inside. We’re polite with each other. We’ve always been polite.
“Rainy night, October of 1983,” Mom said. “An airport run. He sold industrial hinges, and he talked about hinges for twenty minutes. And I remember thinking, this man is never going to ask me one hard question.”
“That sounds romantic.”
“It sounded safe. At forty-one, safe sounded wonderful.”
She smiled a little.
“He asked me to marry him eight months later. Politely, like he was ordering lunch.”
“And you said…”
“Yes. Before he finished the sentence.” She looked right at me. “I had learned what happens when you say you need time.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Raymond was a good man,” she said. “He knew he was second place. I don’t think he ever said it out loud, and I know I never did. We were married nine years. Then he moved to Phoenix, and I let him go.”
I was seven when he left.
I remember my mother crying at the airport, and I remember thinking she was sad about losing him. Maybe she was. I never asked. I don’t like guessing about my parents, but I’m guessing now.
——————————
“And then there’s you,” she said.
She took my hand. Her fingers were thin and warm and shaking a little.
“Victor. What’s your middle name?”
“Henry.” I said it before I thought. “You always told me it was a family name.”
“It was a family name.”
She held my hand tighter.
“It just wasn’t ours.”
The game show down the hall went quiet. Or maybe I just stopped hearing it.
Forty years of forms. Job applications. A marriage license. Victor H. Wagner. I had spent my whole life signing a name without knowing the story behind it.
“I named my son after a man who walked away from me,” she said. “And I never told you. I’m so sorry.”
“Is this something I should be angry about?”
“I don’t know.” Her smile was small and a little broken. “Ask me on Tuesday.”
I laughed. Then I wasn’t laughing. Then I was doing both.
——————————
When I could talk again, she was holding the folder against her chest.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “This is the part I need your help with.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t say that until you hear it.”
She untied the string on a stack of envelopes I hadn’t noticed. Dozens of them. Cream paper, faded, all in the same careful handwriting.
“After Henry said no, I wrote to him once a year. Every October, on the day he asked me.”
She looked at the stack.
“Sixty letters. I never mailed a single one.”
I stared at them.
“Henry moved back to Ohio in 2004,” she said. “His wife passed in 2019. I read it in the obituaries. I read everything, Victor. I always knew where he was.”
“Where is he now?”
“Forty minutes from this parking lot.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m eighty-four years old,” my mother said. “And I’m still afraid of a man’s front door.”
She held out the top envelope. The paper was newer than the others. The ink was darker.
“This is the last one. I wrote it last month. My eyes are bad and my nerve is worse, so I need you to read it to me. Out loud.”
“Mom…”
“Please.”
My hands weren’t steady either.
I opened the envelope and unfolded the page.
The first line was only six words long.
Dear Henry, I’m sorry I’m late.
⚑ Report