Diane called every morning that week. Sometimes Helen answered. Sometimes she let the phone ring and listened to her daughter's voice fill the answering machine with practical tenderness: Mom, I brought soup. Mom, the investigator sent a preliminary. Mom, please eat something that isn't tea.
On the Thursday after the letters, Helen drove to the cemetery. Robert's stone was still new enough that the grass around it looked apologetic. She stood with her hands in the pockets of the black cardigan and spoke aloud, which she had not done at the funeral because funerals are for other people's listening.
"You absolute fool," she said. The wind took the words and did not return them. "You absolute careful fool. You left me a house and a ghost and a woman who knows how you take your coffee. What am I supposed to do with any of that?"
A groundskeeper passed at a distance and nodded the way people nod at widows, as if grief were a weather system everyone recognized and nobody interrupted. Helen nodded back. Then she drove to the grocery store and bought lemon candies she did not want, stood in the parking lot holding the bag, and threw them into the trash before she went home.
She returned from the cemetery by the long way, past the high school where Diane had once played soccer under Robert's coaching, past the diner where they had eaten pancakes after every home game. The town kept offering her evidence of a good man. The letters kept offering her evidence of another. Helen decided that both sets of evidence were admissible, and that the trial would not end with a verdict so much as with a sentence she would have to serve in the first person for the rest of her life.
When Diane arrived that evening, Helen did not hide the letters. She set them on the kitchen table beside the salt and pepper shakers Robert had bought on a trip to Vermont, ceramic moose that had always been slightly ridiculous and therefore beloved. Diane read in silence. The cat she had brought with her for company — an orange tabby named Walter who disliked cars and loved radiators — wound around her ankles and then gave up and slept under the table.
"1987," Diane said at last. Her voice sounded scraped. "I was in fourth grade. He coached my soccer team that year."
"I know."