In February, Diane found Robert's fishing cabin receipts and drove to Maine without telling Helen. She stood on a dock in a rented coat and looked at a lake the color of steel and tried to imagine her father here with Margaret — laughing, quiet, holding a thermos, being a version of himself Helen had never been allowed to meet. She called Helen from the car.
"It's beautiful," Diane said. "I hate that it's beautiful."
"Come home," Helen said. "Walter misses you. I miss you. The house is too quiet with only one widow in it."
Of the forty-one years themselves, Helen found herself conducting a private audit she had never requested. 1983: they bought the house on Maple with money from Robert's first big bonus and a loan Helen's father cosigned. She remembered painting the downstairs bathroom a shade called Sea Glass and arguing with Robert about whether the trim should be white or cream. Cream won. She had forgotten until now that she had been right about white.
1987: the year the first letter was dated. Diane in fourth grade. Robert coaching soccer. Helen working part-time at the library's circulation desk, coming home with ink on her fingers and stories about which children always returned their books late. Had he been absent that autumn more than usual? She searched her memory the way you search a dark room for a light switch you used to find without looking. Fishing trips. A conference in Boston. A weekend when he said his mother needed help with the gutters and Helen had sent him with a casserole. The casserole, she realized now, might have gone uneaten in a refrigerator that was not his mother's.
1995: Diane's junior prom. Robert on the porch with a camera, misty-eyed in the way of fathers who discover their daughters have become taller than the stories they tell about them. Helen remembered his hand on her shoulder that night. Warm. Present. Real. The hand, she thought now, had also known other shoulders. The thought did not erase the porch. It only made the porch crowded.
2003: Robert's mother died. The letters had resumed more frequently afterward. Helen remembered holding him in the kitchen while he cried into her black cardigan — a different cardigan, an older one — and feeling, for once, that she was the only person in the world who could reach him. She had been wrong about the only. She had not been wrong about the reaching.
2019: the diagnosis. The nurse who was not a nurse. The lemon candies. The Christmas card. Helen stopped the audit there because continuing felt like chewing glass for nutrition.