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“I can write her a letter,” Hank replies as he nods. “That’s how we’ve always done it. One letter a year, to a post office box. I can write her and tell her what’s happened. Tell her about the car. The diary. The Kessler boy being dead. That you’re looking for her. And I can ask her if she’ll let me tell you. But it’ll be her decision, Lindsey. Not mine or yours. Hers.”
“How long?”
“A week. Maybe two. She always writes back.”
Lindsey looks away, chewing the inside of her lip. “Oh my God,” she breathes.
“Can I ask you one question? Just one. You don’t have to say where she is. Or who she is. Or anything.”
He waits.
Lindsey asks, “Is she happy?”
Hank Simmons looks at her across his kitchen table. Then the old man’s face crumples, and he puts his hand over his eyes.
“Yes,” he says. “Oh, Lindsey. Yes. She’s happy.”
Lindsey breaks. She leaps off the chair and around the table, and she puts her arms around him.
He hugs her back. The two of them cry in his kitchen while the kettle starts to whistle on the stove. I get up and take it off the burner before I go stand on the back porch and look at the damn stars for a while.
I need a minute. Hell, I need more than that.
When she comes out twenty minutes later, her eyes are swollen and her face is pink and she’s smiling. Really smiling, so wide her nose crinkles.
Hank’s porch has a swing. Lindsey sits down on it and pats the seat next to her.
The stars are out over the Huntsville hills and the air is thick and cold.
“She’s happy,” Lindsey whispers into the darkness.
“I heard.”
She leans her head on my shoulder. We swing. After a while she says, “He’s going to write her tonight. He says he’ll mail it first thing in the morning. Says she always writes back.”
“Then she’ll write back.”
“What if she says no?”
“She’s written him every year,” I assure her. “She’s been waiting for somebody to tell her it’s safe, honey. Same as you’ve been waiting for somebody to tell you she didn’t leave you.”
Lindsey is quiet a while.
“You’re pretty wise for a man who only says twelve words a day,” she says.
“I save them up.”
She laughs into my shoulder, and the swing creaks. Inside, Hank’s probably already at the table with a pen in his hand.
“Let’s go home,” I say when she starts to shiver. The heater in my truck takes six miles to knock off the chill. Lindsey puts her boots up on my dash and talks the entire drive.
She talks about June’s rosebushes along Hank’s front walk, and how Hank started coming into the shop for a yellow rose every Friday the week after she died.
“Oh, Hank,” she says. “Travis. He has a yard full of them, but he’s been buying roses anyway.”
“Yeah,” I say, voice thick. Hank was watching over Lindsey too. All those years.
She sighs and taps her boot on the dash. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m giving them to him free from now on.”
