“She wasn’t too proud. She didn’t have your letters.”
“Ms. Brennan. Willa. Do you understand what you’ve — I’ve been angry at a de*d woman since 1994.” His voice went. “I built a whole mother out of that. A woman who cut me off. I’ve told my kids about her that way. I have a daughter who thinks her grandmother was cold.”
“You can tell her something else now.”
“I can tell her something else now.”
He asked me to read the line one more time before he hung up.
Her son is in Ellisbrook and doesn’t know she moved.“That’s what she used it on,” he said. “A stranger asks a dy*ng woman for one true thing and she uses it on my address.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not — Willa, that’s not a fact. That’s a message. She wasn’t telling him something true about herself. She was putting something in a bottle.”
He’s right.
I’ve read the whole notebook four times now and I think Rómulo Pereira is the only person who has correctly identified what a substantial number of those entries actually are.
Not confessions.
Messages, handed to the only person still in the room, in the hope that a man with a drugstore notebook was, somehow, a postal service.
Forty-six years.
Eleven hundred and forty bottles.
And a man who kept every one and could not deliver a single one himself, because he was a stranger with no standing and no names to call and nothing but a bag of pull tabs and the discipline to write it down anyway, in case.
In case somebody came.
I’m the somebody who came.
The other three:
A daughter in the next county who had been told her father d*ed in 1988 with “no one there,” and who learned in my kitchen that a man named Alden had been in the room for nine hours and that her father’s true thing was “the girl’s name is Ruth and she was right about the house.”
She was Ruth.
She had been right about the house.
A grandson who did not believe me until I described the pull tab, and then did, immediately, and violently, because his grandmother had one taped inside her jewelry box with a date on it and the family had assumed it was junk.
