The Harlow Letter

Two weeks into the arrangement, the arrangement had a system, which is to say it had a lie and some logistics. Delphia answered the letters at night, at her aunt's old desk, using Persimmon's actual files — thirty-one years of columns, organized by subject, because the woman had been a librarian in a previous life and a monster of organization in all of them. Grief was oddly good for this work. The letters were small problems, mostly, and small problems were the only kind Delphia currently trusted herself to be useful for. Her answer to the man who wanted to quit his church choir without quitting his church — "God survived Job's complaints; He will survive your departure from the alto section" — got read aloud at the diner. Twice. Marv pretended not to notice her writing it. Fudge supervised. It was, for eleven days, almost a life. Then the Harlow letter came back. It had been answered by Aunt Persimmon in 2003. Delphia knew because Persimmon's files cross-referenced everything, and the new letter — unsigned, typed, smelling faintly of the Gazette's own office copier — contained, word for word, the letter from 2003. My sister and I stopped speaking over our mother's house. She will not return my calls. Is it worth trying once more, or do some doors close for a reason? The file held Persimmon's printed reply, a gentle, careful, devastating thing that Delphia would have been proud to have written. Someone was testing whether Aunt Persimmon was really dead. Delphia told herself it was a prank. She wrote an answer anyway — "Doors close for a reason, but reasons can be wrong; knock once more, and if no one answers, leave the flowers on the step" — and then, because she was her father's daughter, she didn't send it. She looked for the letter in the outgoing bin. It was already gone. The bin sat behind Marv's desk. The copier smelled of toner and recent use. Fudge was asleep on the outgoing mail, which meant someone had lifted a fourteen-pound cat, removed a letter, and put him back — which meant the someone knew Fudge, which meant the someone was in the building, which was not a thought Delphia finished before Marv said her name. He had the Harlow reply in one hand, unopened. He'd intercepted it. He looked like a man holding a live wire. "This came off my desk last night and back onto it this morning," Marv said. "Whoever's moving mail in my building has a key and a grudge. And this letter — this exact letter — Persimmon answered it in 2003, and she told me once there was one letter in thirty-one years she wished she'd never printed. A woman died, and I never asked which letter, and now it's back, to her, in her own paper, and you're answering it." "You know I'm writing the column," Delphia said, and then heard herself. "You knew." "I know the paper's alive and my niece is dead," Marv said, not unkindly. "I know the Goat Doctrine reads like a woman who's been fired from two libraries and learned something at all of them. What I don't know is what Aunt Persimmon was afraid of in 2003, and I know she was afraid, because she asked me to change the office locks that year, and I didn't." He set the Harlow letter on the desk, between the cat and the lamp. "So either we find out what she wouldn't answer," Marv said, "or whoever does finds out you're answering instead. And Delphia — the second one's what I'd bet on."