“Mama, please. Don’t embarrass us.”
“I’m seventy-four years old,” I said. “I’m too old to be embarrassed and too old to wait.”
The road to Dewitt’s ranch ran past the alfalfa fields, cut short and gold. His pickup sat by the corral, the same faded blue as the one I’d learned in 1969. I sat in my car for ten minutes with both hands on the wheel. Then I walked up and knocked on the screen door.
His dog barked once. I heard his boots on the wood floor. The door swung open, and Dewitt stood there with his reading glasses pushed up on his head.
“I was gonna drive into town today,” he said. “After what you told me, I opened Madge’s cedar chest last night.”
He stepped back so I could see past him. On the little table in his front hall sat a stack of envelopes tied with a faded ribbon. The paper was pink.
They were my fourteen letters. My handwriting was on every one. Underneath them were Dewitt’s letters to me, addressed to Sacramento. The postmarks were from Yerington. None had reached me.
For a moment, I couldn’t make myself step inside. The letters looked too ordinary to have held a whole life still. Dewitt didn’t rush me.
“I didn’t know what I’d find,” he said. “I only knew you and I were both telling the same story.”
I went in and lifted the top envelope. My name and Sacramento address were written across the front in the careful hand I’d used at seventeen. The flap had been opened and pressed back down.
I recognized the paper before I recognized the words. Then I saw the first line of my own letter, the one where I’d told Dewitt I missed the valley. I had written it at the little desk in Sacramento and never imagined anybody but him would read it.
