Letters

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She found the box on a Tuesday afternoon while looking for something else. That was how the important things usually returned to you. Not with trumpets or warnings, but beneath old blankets on the top shelf of a closet, covered with dust. It was a small cardboard box tied with a blue ribbon she recognized before she remembered why. She sat down on the bedroom floor and pulled the ribbon loose. Inside were the letters he had written when they were young and dating, before the mortgage and the children and the years that seemed to gather around a marriage like rings inside a tree. His handwriting leaned slightly to the right, impatient and hopeful. Dear Annie, the first one began. She smiled because no one had called her Annie in forty years. Not even him.

She read them there on the floor while the afternoon moved quietly across the room. He had written about missing her after only two days apart, the yellow dress she wore to the county fair, how he had driven home after kissing her goodnight and nearly missed the turn because he could still smell her perfume on his shirt. In one letter he told her he thought he might marry her someday, though he hoped saying so wouldn't scare her away. She laughed at that and then, without warning, began to cry. The man downstairs watching television was the same boy who had written those words, though neither of them had remembered him for a very long time. Life had covered him over with work and bills, children and funerals, arguments about money, leaking faucets, doctor's appointments, and years of ordinary Tuesdays.

She carried the box downstairs. He looked up from his chair and saw the letters in her hands. For a moment neither of them spoke. Then she held out the one about the yellow dress. "Do you remember her?" she asked. He took the letter and studied his own young handwriting as though it had arrived from another planet. Then he looked at her, really looked at her, and something old and bright crossed his face. "I do," he said. She sat beside him, and he reached for her hand with the same hand that had written all those impossible promises so many years before. Outside, evening gathered among the trees. Somewhere beyond the windows, the world kept growing older. But inside the house, for a little while, two young people sat together again, astonished that love had managed to find them twice. 

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