The First Envelope

She lasted until Thursday.

By Thursday the solicitor had been and gone, the boat had turned out to be a hole in the water that her father had been bailing out weekly for a decade, and Ada had discovered that the heating was being paid by a standing order from an account that still had four hundred and twelve pounds in it.

She sat on the end of his bed with the envelopes in her lap and told herself she would open one. One, tonight, and the rest when she was somewhere else with somebody around.

They were numbered in the corner in pencil, very small, the way he had numbered everything. She had always assumed it was a habit from the yard. Now she wondered if it was something else.

The first one was dated the year she left.

Ada, it began, and then a gap of most of a line, as if he had sat with the pen down for a while. I have started this eleven times and every time I get to your name and think, she will not read past it.

She read past it.

I am not going to write to tell you that you were wrong to go. You were not wrong to go. You were nineteen and I was not making it possible to stay, and those two things are one sentence, not two.

What I want to put down, because I am no good at it out loud and you know that better than anybody, is what the house does now. In case you ever want to know. I think you might want to know one day and I will not be any better at saying it then.

The gull with the bad foot still comes. I have stopped pretending I do not feed it.

Ada put the letter down on the bedspread and put both hands over her face and sat like that until the paper stopped making sense to look at.

There were eight more. He had written one a year, every year, and never sent a single one, and had stacked them where the only person who would ever find them would be the person they were for, standing in his bedroom, after.

That, she thought, is the most like him thing he has ever done.

She did not open the second. She put them back on the nightstand, squared to the edge, and went downstairs and did not sleep.

In the morning the gull with the bad foot was on the wall by the yard, standing on its one good leg with the patience of something that had been fed at this time by this house for nine years and did not intend to be told otherwise.

Ada went inside, and came out with bread, and swore at herself the entire time.