What You'd Be Ashamed to Have Found

Persimmon's apartment — Delphia's apartment now, technically, the lavender and type-writer-ribbon one — had a room Delphia hadn't opened since the funeral. The spare bedroom held the good chair nobody sat in and a cedar chest nobody opened, and Delphia had told herself, for three weeks, that respect was the reason. Respect had nothing to do with it. She was afraid of the cedar chest. She'd been afraid of it since she was nine, when Persimmon had told her, at a family reunion, over potato salad: "Never write down what you'd be ashamed to publish. And never keep what you'd be ashamed to have found." Then she'd winked and said nine-year-old Delphia could have the chest when she learned the difference. Delphia was twenty-nine and still working on the difference. She brought Marv, because Marv had survived three editors and one fire, and she brought Fudge, because the cat had outlived everyone and owed someone an explanation. The chest held columns, naturally. Thirty-one years of clipped issues, annotated in the margins — but not with notes on the letters. With notes on the people. Persimmon had known Fig Hollow the way a cartographer knows water: not by looking at it, but by knowing exactly where not to build. The margins were full of where not to build. The mayor's second mortgage. The fire chief's first marriage. The pie festival's suspiciously annual insurance payouts. And under the clippings, a folder with the elastic gone brittle, containing a single letter and a printed column that had never run. The letter was from 2003. It was not about a sister or a house. Typed, unsigned, it read: You printed that I stole the money. I have been paid in full every year since by everyone who reads you and crosses the street. You will tell me which of my neighbors said it, or I will make you an answer that prints itself. — The Harlow you answered too kindly. The unprinted column was Persimmon's draft reply. Dear Harlow: You are right that I wronged you, and I will not make it right by un-wronging it. I ran the letter you sent to me, as you wrote it, signed as you signed it, and if that was not your hand then the wrong is mine to carry, and I will carry it in the paper, in print, next week, with my name on it. — Then the editor's stamp across the draft, in Marv Kettle's young handwriting: NOT RUNNING THIS. YOU'LL GET YOURSELF KILLED, P. Delphia read it twice. Persimmon had received a letter she believed was a forgery, printed it — under a policy of radical honesty about her own mistakes — destroyed a man named Harlow, and then, decades later, decided to confess in print, and Marv had stopped her. "I stopped her," Marv said, from the doorway, in a voice like a floor giving way. "I stopped her and I told myself it was for the paper." Fudge, on the chest lid, had gone stiff and was looking at the door. Someone knocked. Twice, politely, the way people knock in a town where everyone knows everyone, and through the frosted glass of the front door, Delphia could see the shape of a large man in a fire-department windbreaker, holding — she could see it, faintly, through the frost — holding a letter. "Gazette business," the voice called, warm and official. "Got a reply here that says it's for the impersonator. You want to open the door, Miss Marsh? Or should I let myself in like last time?"