I told my daughter that evening.
I expected her to listen.
I expected questions.
Perhaps I even expected her to tell me I was right to be cautious.
I didn't expect her to look at me as though I had announced that I planned to walk into traffic.
She was worried.
I knew that.
But worry can make people speak as though the person they're trying to protect has stopped being capable of making decisions.
My daughter reminded me of my age.
She reminded me how far away Susanville was.
She asked whether I had considered the possibility that someone was trying to take advantage of me.
I had considered it.
I had been considering it since the moment I saw the card.
I knew that a familiar-looking piece of handwriting was not proof that Danny was alive.
I knew that the telephone call could have been part of something dishonest.
I knew I might drive two hours and find a stranger who had no idea who I was.
But I also knew that the flowers had been chosen for a reason.
Nobody had sent me a random bunch of flowers.
There had been black-eyed Susans.
There had been blue blossoms.
And there had been one dandelion in the center.
The card carried a name that had never belonged to anyone else in my life.
I tried to explain that.
My daughter wasn't convinced.
She thought I was letting grief interfere with my judgment.
Maybe I was.
I had spent years telling myself that I had accepted Danny's death.
I had built a life after him.
I had loved Ted, raised our children, and watched our grandchildren grow.
I had done everything people told me a person was supposed to do after losing someone they loved.
Yet one card had brought the past back so quickly that I could hardly keep my thoughts in order.
I couldn't blame my daughter for being alarmed.
She had not been there when Danny asked me to dance.
She had never seen the ring he gave me.
She had never held those thirty-one letters in her hands.
She knew the story of my life, but she hadn't lived the part of it that had ended before she was born.
She couldn't know why a misspelled nickname mattered so much.
I could have let her concerns settle the question.
I could have decided that an elderly woman had no business driving two hours to investigate something she couldn't prove.
I could have gone to bed, left the flowers on the table, and returned to my ordinary routine the next morning.
Instead, I went to the cedar chest.
I opened it and found the Whitman's candy box.
I carried it to the kitchen table.
The box was not much to look at after all those years.
It was simply a place where I had kept things I couldn't bring myself to throw away.
I opened the lid.
The letters were still there.
Thirty-one.
I had counted them more times than I could remember.
I took them out carefully.
I didn't want to bend the envelopes or damage the paper.
I arranged them on the table and began reading.
The first letter brought back the feeling of being young and waiting for news from someone far away.
I remembered how I used to handle the envelopes.
I remembered wanting to read each one slowly, then reading it again because I didn't want the feeling of having Danny near me to end.
The words were his.
The handwriting was his.
I moved through the letters one at a time.
I wasn't looking for a secret message.
I wasn't expecting to discover something hidden between the lines.
I wanted to see the writing.
I wanted to make certain my memory hadn't changed it over the years.
It hadn't.
His capital D still leaned forward.
The letters still carried the same uneven rhythm.
And when I came across the nickname, I felt the same small pull in my chest that I had felt as a young woman.
Dandylion.
There it was.
I sat with the letters spread around me.
I thought about the young man who had written them.
I thought about the woman who had received them.
Both had belonged to a world that no longer existed.
I had spent decades accepting that the man who wrote those letters had died in a hospital in Texas.
His mother had told me he was gone.
She had said he was buried in Ohio, among her own family.
She had told me not to make the journey.
At nineteen, I hadn't asked enough questions.
I had no money for the trip.
I had no reason to think she was lying.
I had done what she told me and returned to the business of surviving my grief.
Now, at seventy-seven, I found myself wondering what I should have asked.
Which hospital?
Which cemetery?
Which town?
Why had she been the one to write to me?
Why had I never received another message from anyone connected to Danny?
Those questions had existed somewhere inside me for years, but I had learned to live without asking them.
The flowers had made that impossible.
I put the letters back into their box.
I didn't feel foolish anymore.
I felt afraid.
There was a difference.
Being foolish meant believing something without thinking.
I had thought about this more than I wanted to.
I had considered the ways I could be wrong.
I had considered what it would mean to discover that the flowers had been sent by someone who knew nothing about the real Danny.
I had considered what it would mean if they had come from Danny himself.
Neither possibility was easy.
I closed the box.
The next morning, I decided to drive to Susanville.
I didn't announce my decision to the entire family.
I didn't need to turn it into an argument.
I had an address.
I had a reason to go.
And I had reached the age when I understood that some questions became harder to live with the longer you avoided them.
Before leaving town, I stopped at Raley's for gas.
I pulled into the parking lot afterward and stayed in the car.
The engine was off.
My hands rested on the steering wheel.
For a while, I didn't move.
The sensible part of me kept repeating my daughter's warnings.
I was seventy-seven.
I had no proof that Danny was alive.
I had no idea what the woman on the telephone would do if I appeared at her house.
Perhaps I would arrive and find that the address was wrong.
Perhaps the entire thing was a mistake.
Perhaps my daughter was right, and I was about to make a fool of myself.
I looked down at my hands.
They were older than the hands that had once held Danny's ring.
They had signed insurance forms, prepared meals, cared for children, and held the hands of people I loved.
They had also carried those letters from one house to another.
I thought about the candy box waiting at home.
I thought about the card.
Then I started the car.
The drive north gave me plenty of time to change my mind.
I could have turned around at any point.
I could have told myself I had done enough by making the telephone call.
Instead, I kept going.
When I reached Susanville, the address led me to a small green house on a quiet street.
There was a ramp leading to the front porch.
Beside the door sat a pair of old men's work boots.
They had been polished carefully.
I noticed them before I knocked.
I couldn't have explained why they mattered to me.
Perhaps it was because they looked as though someone had taken the time to care for them.
Perhaps I was simply looking for any sign that might help me understand who lived inside.
I stood on the porch.
My heart was beating hard enough that I could feel it in my throat.
Then I knocked.
A woman answered.
She looked about fifty.
There was gray at her temples, and she was still wearing scrubs, as though she had come home from working through the night.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
Before either of us had said very much, I knew she recognized me.
Not because she had met me before.
Because she knew who I was supposed to be.
She spoke first.
She called me the Dandelion.
Then she told me she was Danny's daughter.
For a moment, I couldn't find my voice.
The word daughter seemed to move through my mind slowly.
Danny had a daughter.
A daughter who was standing in front of me, looking at a woman who had once expected to marry her father.
I asked whether he was there.
I needed to hear the answer.
The woman's eyes filled with tears.
She gripped the door with both hands, and I could see that she was struggling to hold herself together.
She told me he had wanted me to receive the flowers.
She also told me he had never intended for me to come.
I tried to understand the distinction.
He had sent the flowers.
He had written the card.
He had used the name only he had called me.
Yet he didn't want me to see him.
His daughter pleaded with me to leave.
She said he didn't want me to see him in his present condition.
Then she began closing the door.
I stood there, looking at the narrowing space between us.
I had driven two hours to reach that porch.
I had spent a night rereading letters I had kept for more than half a century.
I had questioned my own judgment and ignored my daughter's advice.
Now the one person who could answer the questions I had carried for fifty-eight years was apparently close enough to hear me speak, yet his daughter was trying to send me away.
I didn't know what I should say.
I didn't know what she was protecting him from.
Then a man's voice came from inside the house.
He called her Selena.
He told her to wait.
The woman froze with her hands still gripping the door.
And I knew that voice.
Older.
Rougher.
Changed by years I had never witnessed.
But unmistakably Danny's.
Click here to continue reading: PART 5: The Voice Behind the Door Belonged to the Boy Who Had Written Me Thirty-One Letters Before Vanishing From My Life
I Kept Thirty-One Letters From the Boy I Thought I Had Lost, Even After I Built a Whole Life With Another Man
Part 4 of 12
