Her fingers were elongated by the boniness of them; her knuckles large and looking like they might tear through the paper-thin flesh. She always cut herself when she opened an envelope, so long ago she kept a butter knife on her writing table.Getting the mail was one of the few rituals she had in a day. A walk to the mailbox took fifteen minutes because she shuffled her feet, her corns catching in her tattered old terrycloth house shoes, burns on the bottoms from stubbing out cigarettes at the back landing. She was only 73 but looked 90 because she had smoked so many cigarettes in her day. Her hair was still long and braided tightly in a halo on top of her head. Unraveled it came down past her shoulder blades, gray and white and honey colored and always cool and moist to the touch. She perfumed her hair with oils and rosewater. She said that was her secret; she didn't say what it was her secret to. Perhaps to keeping her hair from smelling like an ashtray, perhaps her secret to her cool, moist hair. That was another ritual she enjoyed. She used to braid her hair only once a week, but after Clyde died she started doing it every day, taking it down, brushing it a hundred and twenty times and putting it up again. To help herself keep from getting lonely. She never felt too lonely so she dared not stop that ritual.
And here it was six months later, the house as still as the day she woke up next to her dead husband; her buddy as she called him. Her best friend. Someone recently convinced her to go through his things, to donate his suits to the church or Goodwill, to find a cabinet at the VFW Hall to display his WWII medals and uniform. It wasn't doing any good all boxed up like that, and it was probably gonna just get eaten up by bugs or end up smelling like mothballs. She couldn't keep it hanging at attention in the closet there with her few nice dresses. It looked like a soldier among a bunch of gay women in the closet there.
The box on the top shelf was his personal box, he never told her not to look in it, but it was his private collection. Pictures and things from his first marriage. She didn't have any need to go in there while he was alive. And now it seemed she did have a need to go in, to sort it all out, to figure out what to do with it. Her bony hands took down the box, its lid trembling, making a rattling cardboard sound as she walked from the closet to the bed and set it there and lifted off the lid. He was eight years older than her. He married her when she was only 18. He was already a man, experienced in the ways of the world, the experience of war in a foreign land, a wife dying in his arms, the love of his life. She knew this. She wasn't jealous of this woman she never met; she was glad her buddy had had the opportunity to be so deeply in love. She knew it would never happen for her, but she didn't mind. He was a good man, he took care of her always.
Inside the box were dozens of letters sealed and stamped and addressed to an Audrey Rose. Not his late wife; the woman who had at one time been this old girl's best friend. But shortly after their marriage, Audrey stopped calling, stopped coming round, made excuses, seemed to disappear out of her life.
She opened one of the letters. She carried the one on top to the writing desk and took her butter knife out of the top right drawer, slid it into the space at the top of the V-shaped flap on the back, the little opening where his tongue had not managed to wet the glue. She had a strange sense about the letter, about what she would find her late husband had written to her best friend. It seemed queer that the letter was unsent. The letter on top was only a year old, the postage stamp was three-cents shy of being proper.
As she imagined deep in the recesses of her heart, the envelope held a love letter written by her husband, her best friend: To Audrey Rose. It was three pages long, but she only read the first page, and then turned to the bottom of the third page to be sure (even though his handwriting was unmistakable) and see his salutation, "Yours in Unrequited Love, Clyde." Then she folded the letter up, returned it to the envelope, walked back to the box on the bed in their guest bedroom and gathered up all of the letters. She only looked through them to make sure they were also addressed to Audrey Rose.
There was one at the bottom addressed to Clyde, the address was typed, the return address a p.o. box. She didn't remember seeing the envelope when it arrived, but imagined she probably had because she always collected the mail and put the envelopes and other mail addressed to Clyde in the open nook on the tall back of the writing desk they shared. The return address was the same as the address under Audrey Rose's name on all of the unsent letters Clyde had addressed, so she knew it was from her to him. The date was hard to read, but the envelope was yellowed with age and so she knew it had been there a long time. She put that envelope aside and planned to later burn it in the fireplace (without reading it, of course).
The others, she stacked together on the writing desktop. She pulled the large drawer open and found a large envelope from Clyde's old office supply stash and put all of the letters he had written in the envelope, then she put as many stamps as she could find on the envelope, addressed it as he had to Audrey Rose, with no return address, and then slowly shuffled out to the mailbox at the street and stuffed the envelope in it and raised the flag.
