- I went to Thanksgiving.
- Clare and David live in a little rented two-bedroom in Wethersfield now. Clare took a job at a nonprofit in Hartford that helps families sort out estate problems. She says she found her calling the hard way.
- That first Thanksgiving, the turkey was dry and the gravy was lumpy and David set off the smoke alarm twice. It was the best Thanksgiving I’ve had in fifteen years.
- Before dinner, Clare brought out a box.
- The forty-three letters.
- We sat on her living room floor and read every single one of them out loud. In order. It took four hours. David kept refilling our wine and didn’t say a word. When we got to the letter I wrote the night before she turned sixteen, we both had to stop for a while.
- The probate court in Hartford ordered a full accounting of my mother’s trust that winter. I’ll spare you the details. Some of the money was exactly where it was supposed to be. Some of it had been “temporarily borrowed” over the years to cover cash shortfalls at the company. And the Cape house on Wellfleet had a lien on it that never should have been there.
- The judge appointed an independent trustee from a bank in Boston. My father resigned as trustee before the court could remove him. His lawyer advised it.
- Ulette Insurance Group refinanced its debt the next spring without my mother’s house. Richard Hale sold his share of the company and moved to Florida. Margaret went with him for a while. Then she didn’t.
- I didn’t ask for anything from the trust. I signed my share of the Cape house over to a scholarship fund in my mother’s name, for girls from Hartford high schools who want to go into aviation. Clare matched it with half of hers.
- We spent one week there together last August, before the transfer went through. Just the two of us. We sat on the back deck every night with ice cream cones, watching the sun go down over the bay.
- Mine was chocolate. Hers was strawberry.
- It dripped down her arm.
- My father called me once.
- It was March. A Tuesday. My office phone at Hanscom. My aide put him through because he said he was family.
- “Evelyn,” he said.
- “Hello, Dad.”
- He was quiet for a long time. I could hear him breathing.
- “I read them,” he said finally. “Some of the letters. You were right.”
- “I know.”
- “The one from Germany. About flying over the mountains at sunrise.” He cleared his throat. “Your mother would have liked that one.”
- I didn’t say anything.
- “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “I’ve never known how to do this.”
- “I know, Dad.”
- “I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
- “Good,” I said. “Because I’m not ready to.”
- Another long silence.
- “Clare says you’re coming up for Easter.”
- “I am.”
- “Would you…” He stopped. Started again. “If I came by. For an hour. Would you be there?”
- I looked out my office window at the runway. A C-17 was lifting off into a gray New England sky, heavy and slow and beautiful.
- “Ask Clare,” I said. “It’s her house. Her table. Her rules.”
- He was quiet.
- “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask her.”
- I don’t know what she’ll say. I don’t know if he’ll come. I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to look at me and see his daughter first, and the uniform second.
- But I know this.
- The photograph from my mother’s box is in a frame on my desk now. Right next to my phone. Two girls on the hood of a station wagon.
- And on the back of the frame, where nobody else can see it, I taped the note in her handwriting.
- My girls. If they ever forget how much they belong to each other, remind them.
- We did forget, for a while. Not because we wanted to. Because someone made sure we couldn’t find each other.
- But Clare remembered first.
- And she reminded me.
- THE END..!
