I was stacking birch when the truck came up the gravel behind a car I knew. Five years of nothing, and then my son at the bottom of my porch steps telling me I looked good while two movers waited inside. Kendra explained they had been worried, especially since Odalys passed, and that they had already given up their lease because I had all this space. She walked through my sister’s cabin like an appraiser, opening closets, asking what waterfront was worth up here, telling me that at my age I ought to know the value of my assets. So I made coffee and said nothing, because on that porch anything I said would have become proof I was difficult.
That night I found the shoebox in the study drawer, under the receipts, beside my sister’s glasses on a seed catalogue. Forty letters, every one addressed to me in her handwriting, every one sent back in Kendra’s. She wrote to me monthly for five years and watched each envelope return, and she died thinking I had chosen not to answer her