The Letters He Sent Back
Chapter 05 - The Letters He Sent Back
The first letter June had written began with a joke about the theater roof and ended with an invitation to spend a weekend repairing its windows. The second asked whether Claire might visit for June's seventieth birthday. By the fifth, the jokes had stopped.
*I don't know whether you're too busy or whether someone is making decisions for you. I've tried to respect your marriage. I miss the girl who could sit for hours watching light move through colored glass. If she is still there, tell her the worktable is ready.*
Claire sat on the theater steps while Elise read beside her. There were eleven letters in all. She had answered none because she had seen none. June had died the previous spring, eight months before Claire left Victor. Their last conversation had been brief and strained. Claire remembered wondering why her aunt sounded distant.
Now there was no one to apologize to.
Elise took the letters carefully. “You can be angry.”
“I know.”
“You look like you're trying not to.”
Claire pressed her fingers against the rough stone. “I spent so much time thinking his affair was the worst thing he'd done. I could have been here. I could have seen her while she was alive.”
Winnie sat a few steps above them. “June knew you loved her, honey. She was furious with Victor, not you. She told me she was leaving this place to you because nobody could turn back an inheritance with a note on an envelope.”
At that Claire bent forward and wept, not delicately. A woman passing with her groceries glanced over and kept walking. Elise sat close without offering advice.
The next morning they began clearing the theater. It was better than sitting with pain that had no clean place to go. Nora brought old towels. Winnie located a working vacuum. Elise climbed a ladder to remove a nest of dead bulbs from the balcony.
A man with a red toolbox appeared shortly after ten. He was broad-shouldered, with silver at his temples and a habit of announcing his presence before entering a room.
“Nora said somebody might be doing something reckless to the electrical system,” he called.
“Only emotionally,” Claire answered.
He grinned. “Caleb Wilder. I used to fix the lighting for June. And occasionally the plumbing, though I was never any good at that.”
Caleb was fifty-five, a widower with an adult son in Vermont. He owned a small electrical business and volunteered at the community theater in the next county. He did not ask about Claire's last name, or why a woman with expensive luggage was cleaning dust from a derelict building. He checked the breaker box, pronounced it ancient but salvageable, and showed Elise which outlets were safe to use.
At lunch he ate the sandwiches Nora brought and told a story about June insisting on staging *A Midsummer Night's Dream* with seventeen people and no working stage lights.
“She gave everybody a flashlight,” he said. “The audience thought it was experimental theater.”
Claire remembered the performance. She had played a fairy with a crooked paper crown. For the first time in days, a memory arrived without hurting.
In Manhattan, Victor found the old correspondence in a file marked HOUSEHOLD. He had no recollection of returning every letter. He remembered June calling too often when Claire was organizing a large fundraiser. He remembered deciding Claire didn't need another obligation, and instructing Marisol to send the mail back. Later he'd written on the envelopes himself when June refused to stop.
Back then it had felt like protection. Looking at the dates now, he saw what he'd really protected: the arrangement of his household, with Claire always available and no part of her life too inconvenient for him to manage.
He called Marisol into the study. She remained standing.
“Why didn't you tell me June died wanting to see Claire?” he asked.
“I did tell you,” Marisol replied. “At her funeral. You said Claire would be upset for a few weeks, then get back to normal.”
He looked away.
“I shouldn't have obeyed your instruction about those letters,” she said. “I wish I hadn't. I have spent a long time regretting it.”
“You could've told her.”
“Yes. I could have.” She folded her hands. “That's why I'm leaving at the end of the month. Your wife offered me a room at the theater while I look for work. I want to help her get it open.”
Victor felt an ugly impulse to tell her she couldn't. He swallowed it.
“Does everybody hate me?”
Marisol looked at him with a kind of pity he could hardly bear. “That's not the important question, Mr. Moretti.”
That afternoon Lydia sent Claire a carefully drafted notice to Victor's attorneys concerning the condominium. Claire reviewed it, then added a sentence requesting that future contact be handled through counsel. She had no interest in listening to Victor explain what he'd been thinking while he kept her aunt's letters away from her.
Before dinner Elise showed her a message circulating online. A photograph taken outside the Moretti house showed Claire climbing into a car with her suitcase. The caption claimed she'd emptied a family account and vanished with a younger man. Several celebrity-gossip sites had picked it up.
“How much younger?” Nora asked, peering at the phone. “Because I could do with the encouragement.”
Claire laughed once before the fear arrived. Her name, her daughter's family, the reason she had left: all turned into something people could casually consume over supper.
Lydia called. “We can demand a correction. The money claim is false. Don't respond in anger.”
“Victor did this?”
“We don't know.”
At nearly midnight Victor called Marco, who finally answered from Miami.
“This smear about Claire,” Victor said. “Get it taken down.”
“You're making a mistake defending her,” Marco replied. “If she starts looking at the condominium records, she's going to cause problems for all of us.”
“Tell me what you mean.”
May you like
There was a pause. Marco had been beside Victor since they were boys, the friend who'd once carried him home after a street fight, the man he trusted with everything unpleasant enough not to examine.
“Victor,” Marco said, “your wife didn't just leave you. She's about to discover how you paid for that apartment.”
