Chapter 2: First Class Mail

Soon after I met Charlotte, I developed the firm impression that there was more to her than met the eye. One day I decided to test that. We were in the kitchen of my house, and she was standing at the counter, holding a latte. “Your dad tells me you’re smart, with good ideas,” I said. “But sometimes you need a nudge. He says you have an idea for a business. Is he right?”

Charlotte seemed to stand straighter. “How did you know about my idea for a business?” she asked, her eyes coming alive. “I want to open an equine therapy program and use horses to help kids who’ve been through trauma.”

She said this without hesitation, as if the place already existed. She apparently knew the ropes, as she told me she studied equine‑assisted therapy at UT, then volunteered at a program outside Bastrop. And then she looked at me as if she expected me to help build it. Which, in fact, I later did.

It was around that time that I learned Charlotte not only had ideas for her business. She also had a firm idea of how people should behave in the world – or at least in her world. I discovered that when I told her something I had never told another living soul.

I told her about Brianna.

She and I went to high school together. Brianna was tall and slender, with chestnut brown hair and cheeks that often had a rosy shade. Her voice tended to crack even as she talked, which I found endearing. We had known one another for several years, but it was only as seniors that we began to connect. At first, a little. Then a lot.

I took her to our prom. Brianna wore a white blouse with a long black dress. I rented a ridiculous blue tuxedo made from cheap fabric that made me look like a tropical fish with a bowtie. After the dance we had Italian food, then managed to kill the night – innocently – until we showed up at our friend Marcia’s place for an early breakfast for ten. No one else made it.

That was in May. Just a few weeks later, I moved to Seattle with my parents. My dad was a traveling salesman, basically. But he had been promoted to regional management. I had a car by then – a creaky Toyota Camry. I drove down to Oregon to see her three or four times over the summer. In June, she invited me down to attend her sister’s wedding. As a clueless seventeen-year-old, I had no concept of the significance of that.

When I was visiting Brianna in Portland, I would stay at Marcia’s and stand in the kitchen laughing as her mother Pat herded the dozen running ducks she had. How the ducks came to occupy a suburban Portland back yard, I never learned.

 I should have shrugged it off. But I didn’t. Instead, I did what I had learned to do growing up in a house where shouting was the default form of communication. I shut down. I stopped writing to her.

More years passed. For some reason I started to think about her again. I had the sense there were some loose ends I wanted to tie up. What was odd was that when I looked, Brianna had no digital footprint. None. Not even Facebook. For a journalist and photographer, that seemed impossible. It was a silence that pulled at me. I turned to paid online services to look for her, and eventually I found someone in North Carolina. I knew it was her because it mentioned her ex-husband’s name – he had proven to be abusive. I even found a phone number and texted it; identifying myself and asking if this was Brianna. No, the reply came.

I told Charlotte all of this. She didn’t raise her voice, but her tone became cold. “What were you thinking?” I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped. She went on. “Who gave you permission?” And finally, “How could you be so intrusive?”

My face felt hot, and I had to look away for a few seconds as if whatever was out the window was suddenly important. Part of me wanted to tell her I had done no harm – that there had been history between us and that I had only wanted to know what had happened to Brianna during that long gap of time. But I had the definite feeling Charlotte would not buy it. She pressed further. “Have you even tried to reach out to her in a mature way?” she asked. I said no. Then she put her hands on her hips and said, “So write her a letter.”

That night I did just that – sitting at the kitchen table, my pen making a scratching sound on the paper as I struggled to make it legible. It went, in part, like this:          

 “I’ve thought a lot about the time in our lives when we first met. What I remember most isn’t anything dramatic; it’s just that you were the first young woman who was easy for me to be around as myself.”

I showed it to Charlotte. We were both at the kitchen table now, and as she read, I could see her eyes moving along each line. When she finished, she folded the page once and handed it back to me. I took it from her and glanced down. The paper had not been creased when I handed it to her. Now it was. “Thomas,” she said finally. “This is a real letter.”

“What do you mean?” I looked again at the crease.

“You didn’t write this to impress her. You wrote it because not writing it has been hurting you for years.”

I hadn’t thought of it quite like that. “What strikes me most,” Charlotte continued, “is that you told her what you couldn’t tell her back then. About your immaturity. About why you shut down. And about the way you see your time with her now, after years have passed.”  She brushed her hair back. A stubborn strand still fell over her forehead. “And you didn’t ask anything of her. You didn’t demand forgiveness. You didn’t ask for a reunion. You didn’t even ask for a response. You just gave her the truth.”

Another pause.

“I’m proud of you.”

I took the letter from her and put it in an envelope I had already addressed and stamped. Then I told her I wasn’t sure I would send it. She looked at me and nodded. “You do what you think is right,” she said. “And you and I both know what that is.”

The next day, I walked to the mailbox, put the letter inside, and lifted the flag.

That night, I sat until late at the kitchen table, a glass of Merlot next to me. I thought, and remembered, then thought some more. The tuxedo. The song. Her voice.

I took another drink of wine. The Texas wind rattled a window.

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