I put down my fork. “Go ahead.”
“Why didn’t you ever write me back? I wrote you every week that fall.”
My stomach dropped. I stared at his plate, at a roll he hadn’t touched.
“I wrote you,” I said. “Fourteen times.”
He looked at me for a long second. “Madge told me you’d met somebody out there. Said you asked her to tell me to quit.”
My daughter saw my face and came over quick. She took my elbow and steered me outside, away from the tables and the people who were pretending not to watch.
“Mama, he’s Aunt Madge’s husband. People will talk.”
“Let ’em,” I said, though my voice had gone thin.
Old Sid was outside having a cigarette. He’d run the drugstore where I rang up customers for twenty-six years instead of finishing nursing school. He’d known us all since we were in diapers.
“Lulu,” he said, “you go out to that ranch, and folks will say you waited fifty years for your sister to die.”
That stung. It was exactly what I was afraid people would say. I also knew Sid wasn’t saying it to be mean. He thought he was saving me from a painful mistake.
That night I sat in front of Wheel of Fortune at seven with my TV tray and didn’t see one puzzle. I kept thinking about those fourteen pink envelopes. Where had they gone? And where had Dewitt’s gone?
I told myself maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Maybe I was a silly old woman chasing a summer from back when gas was thirty-five cents. I didn’t sleep much.
At six in the morning, I put on my good slacks and a little lipstick. My daughter called while I was backing out.
