My wife of forty-one years used one of her last clear hours to make me promise I’d go find the woman who turned down my ring when I was nineteen. “Find Robin Shafer,” she said, holding my wrist so hard it hurt. “And when she tells you, try to forgive me.” I kept that promise, and I’m still not right.
Dolores spent her last nine days in a rented hospital bed in our den, squeezed in between my recliner and the television.
Forty-one years, and it came down to a bed with rails and a remote nobody touched.
The hospice nurse, Magdalena, came Mondays and Thursdays and always left her clogs on the mat with the toes pointed at the door.
I slept in the recliner.
Mostly I didn’t sleep.
On the sixth night Dolores woke up clear, the way the pamphlet said can happen near the end.
She got hold of my wrist harder than she’d held anything in a month.
“You have to do one thing for me, Lee,” she said.
“Anything. Name it.”
“Robin Shafer. Find her.”
I honestly thought it was the morphine talking.
“Honey, I haven’t said that name out loud since Carter was president.”
“I know exactly how long it’s been,” she said. “Find her. And when she tells you, try to forgive me. Please try.”
“Tells me WHAT?”
She shut her eyes.
Magdalena came in to turn her, and I never got another straight sentence out of my wife.
She died three days later, on a Sunday, with the TV still on mute.
Robin Shafer was the first girl I ever loved.
We were nineteen and working the same summer at a drive-in, me running the projector, her behind the popcorn machine with butter up to her elbows.
In August of 1980 a glass plant two states away hired me, and I spent most of my last check on a pawn-shop ring.
I asked her on the hood of my dad’s Pontiac.
She said no.
Her mother was sick, she said, and she wasn’t going anywhere, and I was too proud to ask twice.
So I went alone.
I rented a room from a widow named Mrs. Dixon, and every afternoon her daughter sorted the mail on the hall table.
Her daughter was Dolores.
We got married four years later, and I never once looked back.
I thought she never did either.
After the funeral I tried to let it go.
I couldn’t.
Every time I walked through the den I saw the four square dents the bed left in the carpet.
Try to forgive me for WHAT?
I found Robin the dumb way, through a Facebook group for our old high school class.
Somebody’s cousin knew her.
She was a widow too, living in Muncie, a little under three hours south of me.
It took me eleven days to get in the truck.
When I got there I sat in her driveway for forty minutes with the engine running, feeling like the biggest fool alive.
Then I knocked.
She was gray now, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, but she still had the same crooked front tooth.
“Lee Fontana,” she said.
Not a question.
I told her about Dolores. The bed in the den. The promise.
Robin kept one hand flat on the screen door and didn’t open it any wider.
“She sent you,” she said. “After all this time, SHE’S the one who sent you.”
“She said you’d tell me something. She asked me to forgive her.”
Robin made a sound that wasn’t a laugh.
“I wrote you, Lee. EVERY WEEK that whole winter, to that house with the green mailbox.”
“I never got a single letter.”
“I know you didn’t.”
She took her glasses off and let them hang.
“In March I finally called. A girl picked up and said you were seeing somebody and I needed to quit writing.”
My knees went soft.
I had to grab the porch rail with both hands.
“THAT WAS DOLORES,” I said.
“I worked that out a long time ago.”
“Robin, why were you writing every week?”
She didn’t answer me.
She turned her head and looked back into the dark hallway behind her.
“Justin,” she said. “Come out here a minute. Please.”
Footsteps. Heavy ones.
A man’s.
And Robin said, “Lee, you hang on to that rail.”
The hallway in Muncie
He came out drying his hands on a dish towel.
A big man, bigger than me, in a gray work shirt with the name of a tire shop stitched over the pocket. Gray in his beard. He had to dip his head under the hall light.
And he had my father’s chin. The square one with the dent in it, the one I got and my brother Otis didn’t.
Robin didn’t move her hand off the screen door.
“This is Justin,” she said. “He was born April eleventh, 1981.”
I counted back from April. I didn’t need to. July. The back row of the drive-in after close, with the speaker still hanging in the window.
“He’s yours, Lee,” she said. “In case you’re still counting.”
I had both hands on that rail like it was the only thing holding the porch up.
Justin looked at me through the screen the way you look at a used car somebody already told you about. He folded the towel in half and then in half again.
“I’m forty-five,” he said. “I’ve got a boy of my own in the tenth grade. I don’t need anything from you.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
He nodded like he’d heard that one before, from somebody else, about something else.
“Sure,” he said. “So you’re the money orders.”
Mrs. Dixon’s hall table
I want to tell you about that table, because I walked past it twice a day for four years and never thought about it once.
It was a narrow thing at the foot of Mrs. Dixon’s stairs, with a lace runner and a brass dish for keys. The phone was on the wall right above it, the kind with the long cord, and Mrs. Dixon had a parakeet named Pete in a cage by the window that said “hello” to the mailman and nobody else.
Every afternoon around three, Dolores sorted the mail there. One pile for each boarder. Mine went at the far end, under the brass dish.
She was eighteen. She worked mornings at the five-and-dime and wore her hair pulled back so tight it lifted her eyebrows.
That first Christmas she gave me a card. On the envelope she’d written my name, and her capital L looped back on itself like a ribbon on a package. I teased her about it. She said her mother wrote that way and she couldn’t break it.
For forty-one years she signed every Christmas card we sent “Love, L & D,” and she made my L for me. I never wrote one card in my life.
We married in 1984. We wanted kids right away.
Six years we tried. Doctors in two cities. A calendar on the bathroom door with circles on it. One spring Dolores came home from an appointment, took the calendar down, folded it into the kitchen trash and said, “Some people aren’t given them, Lee.” She never went back. I didn’t push.
She kept the checkbook. Always. She liked it, and I liked not having to.
And every afternoon of our marriage, until Mrs. Dixon died in 2003, Dolores drove across town to her mother’s house to “do Mother’s mail.” Bills, pills, the church bulletin. If I offered to go she said I’d only mix things up.
On the shelf in our hall closet she kept a cedar box with a brass hinge. Mother’s papers, she called it. The key stayed on her own ring, in the bowl by the front door, and in forty-one years I never asked to see inside.
Why would I?
On Robin’s porch I still had both hands on the rail, and the son I never had was holding the screen door open.
Robin’s kitchen table
She let me in because I don’t think she knew what else to do with me.
The kitchen had yellow curtains and a calendar from a funeral home. Robin poured me coffee I didn’t drink. Justin stayed standing, his back against the refrigerator, arms folded.
“Karl raised him,” Robin said. “My husband. Married me when Justin was two and never once made him feel like a stepkid. Karl passed two years ago in February.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry at me,” she said. “Just listen.”
She told it flat, the way you tell a story you’ve told yourself ten thousand times.
The first money order came in June of 1981, when Justin was two months old. Fifty dollars. A plain white envelope, her name and address printed in block capitals, no letter inside, no return address. Postmarked from my town.
Then another one in July. And August.
Every month. Never late. For eighteen years.
The last one came in April of 1999, the month before Justin graduated.
“I figured that was you,” Robin said. “Fifty a month to keep your conscience quiet. Cheaper than a drive.”
“Robin. I never sent you a dime.”
Justin laughed. One short laugh through his nose.
“Okay,” he said. “So somebody in your town had my mom’s address, and fifty bucks a month, and nothing better to do for eighteen years. Who would that be, Lee?”
I didn’t have an answer. I sat there with my coffee going cold and I couldn’t think of one single person.
“When it stopped,” Robin said, “I took it as you saying he was grown and you were done.”
“I never knew he was born.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.”
Justin pushed off the refrigerator.
“Here’s what I know is true,” he said. “Every month that envelope came, my mom put the money in a coffee can for my school shoes and didn’t say a word. And Karl stood right there and watched her do it. Eighteen years. You know what that does to a man? Having another man’s money come into his house every month?”
“I didn’t send it.”
“Then go home and find out who did.”
He walked past me to the front door and pushed the screen open with one flat hand, the same way his mother held it.
He stood there and waited until I went through it.
The checkbook registers
It was ten at night when I pulled into my own driveway.
I didn’t take my coat off. I went down to the basement, where Dolores kept the old checkbook registers on a metal shelf over the dryer, every year bundled in its own rubber band, going back to the year we married.
I started with 1984.
Her handwriting, every line. Groceries. Electric. Saint Bernadette’s. My truck payment.
And on the first Saturday of every month: Mother — P.O. — 50.00.
I’d seen that line a hundred times over the years, the few times I ever looked. I figured it was Mrs. Dixon’s prescriptions. Postal money orders, because her mother didn’t trust checks.
I went through 1985. 1990. 1996.
Every month. Never skipped.
The last one was April of 1999.
May of 1999, nothing. June, nothing. And Mrs. Dixon lived four more years, and she still took the same pills.
I sat on the basement steps until almost two in the morning with those registers in my lap.
The next morning I called Violet.
Violet is Dolores’s younger sister. She was at the funeral in a purple coat when everybody else wore black, and she held my arm at the graveside like she was the one who’d lost a husband. She lives twelve minutes away. She was at my door in twenty, carrying a coffee cake in foil.
I put the 1999 register on the kitchen table and opened it to April.
She didn’t look at it.
“Lee, honey,” she said. “You’re going to dig up things that don’t help a soul. She’s gone. Let her rest.”
“Fifty dollars a month, Vi. For eighteen years.”
“She was a good wife to you.”
“I didn’t ask if she was a good wife.”
Violet cut the coffee cake. She cut it into exact squares, which is what she does when she’s upset, and put one on a napkin and pushed it at me.
“Whatever she did for that boy,” she said, “she did it on her own. Out of her own conscience. You can’t hold that against her.”
I let it sit a second.
“I never told you it was a boy, Vi.”
The cedar box
Violet put the knife down.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. The refrigerator kicked on. A truck went by outside with a ladder rattling on the rack.
“The key’s on her ring,” she said. “It always was.”
I went to the bowl by the front door. Dolores’s keys were still in it, where I’d dropped them after the hospice people left. House, car, her mother’s old house that we sold in 2004, and a small brass one I’d never thought about.
I got the cedar box down from the closet shelf and set it on the kitchen table between us.
The key turned easy. She’d kept it oiled.
On top were Robin’s letters.
Twenty-nine envelopes, all addressed to me in Robin’s round, slanted hand, care of Mrs. Dixon, at the house with the green mailbox. Every one slit neat along the top with a knife. Every one in order by postmark, from September of 1980 to March of 1981.
I opened the first one.
Lee. I’m late, and I’m never late. I’m not telling my mother yet. Write me back.
I opened the one from November.
It’s a baby, Lee. The doctor says April. Why won’t you write me back?
I didn’t open all of them. I couldn’t. I opened the last one, from March.
If you don’t want us, tell me yourself. Don’t have some girl on the telephone do it for you.
Violet sat with both hands around her coffee cup.
“She was eighteen, Lee,” she said. “She’d never had a single thing of her own in her life. And then you walked in the door with your suitcase.”
Under the letters was a stack of postal money order receipts. The customer’s stubs. A rubber band so old it had gone hard and snapped when I touched it.
I counted them later. Two hundred and fifteen.
Under the stubs, by itself, was a white envelope with a postmark from Muncie, May of 1981, and nothing inside it but a photograph.
A baby in a hospital blanket. Red-faced, mad about something, one fist up by his ear.
I turned it over.
On the back, in Robin’s hand: Justin Lee. April 11. 7 lbs 2 oz.
Robin’s kitchen, the second Saturday
At the bottom of the box, under the photograph, was one more envelope I’d missed the first night.
Pencil. A kid’s handwriting, pressing hard. Postmarked Muncie, October 1997. Addressed to Lee Fontana, care of Dixon, at the house with the green mailbox, where Dolores went every afternoon to do her mother’s mail.
Are you my dad? I’m sixteen. I play left tackle. My mom doesn’t know I’m writing. I’d like to meet you one time.
I drove back to Muncie on the second Saturday with the box on the passenger seat. I didn’t call ahead. I didn’t sit in the driveway this time.
Justin answered the door. He looked at the box and then at me, and then he stepped back and let me in.
I set it on the kitchen table and opened it and didn’t say anything.
Robin picked up her own letters one at a time. She didn’t read them. She held them. Her hands were shaking so bad she finally put them in her lap.
Justin picked up the pencil envelope. He went a dark red from the collar up.
“She had this,” he said. “She had THIS.”
“It was in the bottom.”
He went to the drawer under the phone and came back with another envelope, soft as cloth, taped at the folds. He put it on the table in front of me and kept two fingers on it like it might get up and leave.
“I got an answer,” he said. “Two weeks later. You want to read what my father wrote me when I was sixteen?”
I unfolded it.
Son. I have a family here. Don’t write to this house again and don’t come looking. It’s better for everybody. L.
That L. Looped back on itself like a ribbon on a package.
“That’s her L,” I said.
“Her L,” Justin said. “Her L. You know what I did with this? I read it in the truck before every game my junior year. I quit football in the spring. I told Karl I didn’t care about my real dad, and he knew I was lying, and he never said one word, and he went to his grave thinking he wasn’t enough for me. Over this. Over a piece of paper some woman wrote with her mother’s handwriting.”
“Justin,” Robin said.
“No, Mom. He drove down here, he gets to hear it.” He turned back to me. “So the money was her. The letter was her. The phone call was her. You know what that leaves me? A dead woman I can’t even yell at. And you, sitting in my mother’s kitchen with your hands folded, sad. You get to go home and be sad. I got eighteen years of fifty dollars and one goddamn letter telling me to stay gone.”
“I’d have come,” I said.
“Easy to say now.”
“Lee,” Robin said. “I let one phone call decide it. One. I was so mad at you I never called back.”
Justin picked up the stack of stubs and dropped it, and the stubs slid across the table, two hundred and fifteen of them, and some went on the floor.
“What do you want?” he said. “You want Thanksgiving? You want me to call you Dad? I’m forty-five years old.”
I didn’t want anything I could say out loud.
I took one of the stubs off the floor. April 1999. I turned it over and wrote my address on the back, the real one, my own house, my own mailbox, and set it on the table next to his pencil letter.
“I’m not going to write you,” Justin said.
“You wrote me once.”
The den carpet
It’s November now.
Violet hasn’t called. I haven’t called her either. The coffee cake went stale in its foil on my counter, and I threw it out on a Tuesday.
I left the cedar box in Muncie. I have the registers. I have forty-one years of Christmas cards with my L in her hand on every one, in a shoebox in the closet, and I haven’t decided what to do with them.
I haven’t decided anything about Dolores. Some mornings I’m so angry I have to go sit in the truck. Some nights I reach for her side of the bed.
She asked me to try. I’m trying. That’s as honest as I can be.
Last week I dragged my recliner across the den and set its legs down in the four square dents the bed left in the carpet. It fits. Not exactly, but it fits.
Every afternoon around three I walk out to the box at the end of the drive.
Nothing yet.
Sunday I sat in the recliner with a legal pad and wrote him a letter. About the drive-in. About my father’s chin, and my brother Otis, who got the other one. About how I ran the projector that summer and his mother had butter up to her elbows. One page. I didn’t ask him for anything.
I’m going to write him every week this winter.
This morning I put a stamp on the first one, walked it down the drive, and put the flag up.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still has a letter they never got around to answering.
For more family stories shaped by difficult truths and complicated loyalties, read the daughter who challenged her father’s place in her life and the soldier who refused to let his stepbrother define him. And for another family whose expectations take a sharp turn, there’s the husband caught between his wife and his mother.
