I stayed on the front step longer than I should have.
The teenage boy stood nearby, unsure whether he ought to leave or ask whether I needed help.
I could hardly blame him.
He had come to deliver flowers.
Instead, he had found an old woman staring at a small white card as though the words might change if she looked at them long enough.
My hands were shaking.
I tried to steady them by holding the jar with both hands.
The glass was cool against my palms.
The flowers shifted slightly when I moved.
There was nothing frightening about them.
They were simple flowers, the kind a person might pick along the roadside.
Yet the sight of that single dandelion made it difficult to breathe normally.
I looked at the card again.
I knew the handwriting.
Not because it was beautiful.
Not because it was particularly easy to read.
I knew it because I had spent years studying it.
I knew the forward slant of the capital D.
I knew the uneven way the letters sat on the line.
And I knew the name written there.
Dandylion.
Danny had never spelled it the way I would have.
He had written it that way in the letters I kept inside the candy box.
I had never corrected him.
The mistake had become part of the name, and the name had become part of the person I remembered.
There were plenty of people who might have known I was called Sukey.
There were people who knew my real name was Susan.
There were people who could have learned that Danny Wirth had once been my fiancé.
But that particular spelling was different.
It wasn't the sort of detail I had shared with the world.
It belonged to two young people who had been sitting close enough to hear each other speak softly.
It belonged to the yellow dress.
It belonged to a time before the Army, before the letters stopped, before his mother told me he was dead.
I looked at the flowers again.
Black-eyed Susans.
Blue blossoms.
A dandelion.
I couldn't make myself believe it was coincidence.
Still, I tried.
I was old enough to know that wanting something to be true did not make it true.
Someone could have found an old letter.
Someone could have heard a story.
Someone could have decided to play a cruel trick.
I didn't want to be foolish.
I had spent fifty-eight years learning how to live with the fact that Danny was gone.
I didn't want to tear open that part of my life only to discover that a stranger had found a way to hurt me.
But there was the card.
And there was the handwriting.
I asked the delivery boy where the flowers had come from.
He told me they had been ordered through a florist downtown.
I thanked him, though I wasn't sure he heard me.
After he left, I carried the jar inside.
I set it on the kitchen table.
Then I stood there looking at it.
The house was quiet.
I could hear the ordinary sounds that had always filled it: the faint hum of the refrigerator, a car passing outside, the small creaks that came from a house that had been lived in for years.
Everything looked the same.
Nothing felt the same.
I picked up the card once more.
My fingers had become clumsy, and I had to hold it carefully to keep it from slipping.
I wanted to find an explanation that would let me put it down.
I wanted to call someone who could tell me that I was making too much of it.
But the person who would have understood why that handwriting mattered was no longer alive.
Ted couldn't answer me.
And my children would probably tell me not to get carried away.
I reached for the telephone.
My hands were shaking so badly that I dialed the wrong number twice.
The first time, I stopped before the call connected.
The second time, I realized my mistake after I had already begun entering the number again.
I had to slow down.
I had to look at the card.
Then I called the florist.
A young woman answered.
I explained that I had received a jar of flowers and wanted to know who had ordered it.
She was patient with me.
She didn't rush me when I struggled to explain why the question mattered.
I asked whether she remembered the person who had come in.
She said an older gentleman had visited on Thursday.
He had paid cash.
He had filled out the card himself.
According to her, holding the pen had been difficult for him.
I stopped her there.
An older gentleman.
Not a teenage prankster.
Not someone who had simply sent an order from a computer.
A man who had walked into a florist's shop and written the card by hand.
I asked whether she had a name.
She told me the order had been signed D. Wirth.
I felt my chest tighten.
D. Wirth.
Danny Wirth.
She also had a telephone number.
The area code was 530.
California.
I wrote the number down, although I had to check it twice to make sure I had copied it correctly.
Then I sat at the kitchen table with the telephone beside me.
The card lay in front of me.
The flowers stood in their jar.
For a long time, I didn't call.
I thought about Danny as he had been at eighteen.
I thought about the ring.
I thought about the letters.
I thought about the letter from his mother and the way I had accepted her account because I had no reason to imagine anything else.
I thought about the years that followed.
My marriage to Ted.
Our children.
The grandchildren.
The life I had built without Danny.
I wasn't sure what I would say if someone answered.
What did a woman say to a man she had believed dead for fifty-eight years?
How did you begin a conversation that should have happened when both of you were young?
And what if the person who answered had nothing to do with Danny at all?
I could not leave the question alone.
Eventually, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number.
A woman answered.
I introduced myself.
I said my name was Susan Haldane, and I was trying to reach someone connected to Danny Wirth.
I didn't get any farther.
The woman disconnected the call.
There was no explanation.
No question.
No opportunity for me to tell her about the flowers or the card.
One moment, I was speaking.
The next, I was listening to the silence left behind.
I stared at the telephone.
My first feeling was embarrassment.
I felt foolish for having expected a different response.
Then the embarrassment gave way to something harder.
If Danny was alive, why had the woman hung up?
If he wasn't alive, who had sent the flowers?
I didn't know whether to feel hopeful or frightened.
The two feelings seemed to occupy the same space.
I looked at the number again.
I could have called back.
I didn't.
I was too shaken to speak to another stranger and risk hearing the same silence.
Instead, I waited until I could think clearly enough to ask for help.
My grandson was the person I turned to.
I explained what had happened.
I showed him the card.
I told him about the telephone call.
He listened while I tried to put the events in the proper order.
I didn't want to sound as though I had already decided what they meant.
I wanted him to understand why I couldn't simply forget them.
He took out his phone.
Within a couple of minutes, he had found an address.
Susanville, California.
Two hours north of where I lived.
I read the place name several times.
It was close enough to reach in a morning.
It was far enough away that I couldn't pretend I had stumbled into the situation by accident.
I now had a destination.
I still didn't know what I would find there.
But I had the name, the number, and an address.
And I had the handwriting.
That evening, I sat alone with the flowers.
The kitchen table was the same table where I had eaten countless meals, sorted bills, and helped with ordinary family matters.
Now it held a mason jar and a small card that had changed the shape of my life.
I didn't know whether Danny was alive.
I didn't know why his daughter, or whoever that woman was, had refused to speak with me.
I didn't know whether I was about to discover something wonderful or something painful.
I knew only that I could no longer pretend I hadn't seen the card.
For fifty-eight years, I had lived according to a single fact: Danny Wirth had died.
Now I had a reason to question it.
And I could not put that reason back into the box.
Click here to continue reading: PART 4: My Daughter Called It a Fool’s Errand, but I Couldn’t Spend Another Night Pretending I Hadn’t Recognized His Handwriting
I Kept Thirty-One Letters From the Boy I Thought I Had Lost, Even After I Built a Whole Life With Another Man
Part 3 of 12
