People think the hardest part was the waiting. All those nights with the whistle. I know they pity me for it. But Gus, every night I waited for Frank was a night I had Frank to wait for. I would give anything I have left — this house, my own life, anything but my girl — for one more of those nights. One more night sitting up in the kitchen with the coffee going cold, listening for his car in the drive.
So I won't have you wasting what he gave you on feeling sorry. Go home to Teresa and your boys. Watch them grow. Fill your house up and make a great deal of noise. Run toward things. That is the only thank-you he would ever want, and it is the only one I will accept.
With love and without blame,
Anne Haverty
P.S. If you ever see my Nora, and she is grown, and she is afraid of something — tell her I said it was worth it. Tell her the waiting was the price, and I'd pay it again. She won't believe me now. Maybe someday she will.
Nora read it three times. The third time she could not see the words anymore, and she put the letter down on the telephone table under the lamp, and she put her face in her hands in the empty front hall of her father's house and cried — not the way she had cried at twelve, because she had not cried at twelve, not once, she had stood at the graveside in her navy wool coat with her mother's hand crushing hers and not cried at all, and Edith Pruitt had watched her build a wall. She cried now the way you cry when the wall comes down, all at once, with your whole body, for a long time, for everything that had been behind it.
When she was done it was nearly midnight. The house was very cold. She got up and went down to the cellar with a flashlight and relit the furnace pilot the way her father had shown her when she was ten, kneeling on the cold concrete, holding the button down and counting to sixty. The burner caught with a soft whump and a blue flame. She knelt there for a while longer, watching it, feeling the warmth begin to come.