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A woman sat at the large round table in the center of the room, sipping a cup of tea, closing her eyes in the steam, relaxing in a sauna of her mind. She was Nora. She had short, dark brown hair, layered with precision, the kind of hairstyle suggesting a professional who was fanatically busy, with no time to waste on her hair. It had better conform with the rest of her well-ordered life, for she was not above cutting it all off if it did not.
Nora slowly met Rose’s semi-conscious gaze over the rim of the teacup. Nora had familiar dark cobalt-blue eyes.
Rose raised herself on one elbow and gestured to the blanket covering her.
“Thank you for the blanket.”
“You’re quite welcome. We keep it for strangers who fall asleep on the floor without any warning.”
Rose sat up, her back against the couch. “I’m very sorry. I can’t apologize enough. I don’t usually do this to people, unless I know them very well or am very drunk.” She looked around the room. “I made to New Zealand, right?”
“No, this is just the lobby to New Zealand. You still have to pass through a turnstile. How are you feeling this morning?”
Rose hoisted her numb rear end to the couch with no small effort.
“You know how you crumple a wad of paper before throwing it away? That’s how I feel.”
“It’s the jet lag, I reckon.” Nora answered, “Most visitors to En Zed have the same under reconstruction look about them for a day or two. It’s how we identify the tourists without actually tagging them, although I’ve never seen anyone succumb so thoroughly and with as much panache as you. You could turn it into a stage act. Would you like some tea?”
“Please.”
“Righty-o. Then perhaps you could tell me what this is all about.” She lifted Rose’s passport from the table and gave it a slight wave, “Ruz Genowefa Cha-leb.”
“Great detective work,” Rose said. “What else did you lift? My library card better not be missing. And it’s not pronounced cha-leb. It’s not a ‘cha,’ it’s really a huah sound, like you’re bringing up phlegm.”
“Thank you. Phlegm. How vivid.” Nora said, handing her back the passport, “Wait here, thank you.”
Rose pulled herself up and stretched, making soft cracking sounds all over her body, and dropped herself in a chair on the opposite side of table. She could hear Nora speak with her mother in the kitchen. They spoke softly, both with irritation. Rose strained to listen, but could not hear their words for concentrating on their accents. She looked about the room again, this time more furtively and with closer inspection. A thick shaggy rug on the floor still maintained the imprint where she had lain, shelves of knickknacks and photographs, and dim light. It looked like an old person’s home, burdened with too many possessions and cluttered with memories.
Nora came back with a teapot, and took the business of pouring in her stride even while quite aware of Rose watching her with a strange, sad, rapture.
“Now before this becomes a matter for the police or Fair Go,” Nora said with gentle weariness, “What in bloody hell are you doing here?”
Rose lost all the beautiful words of introduction she had rehearsed over the Pacific. Instead, she fished the letters out of her coat pocket, forty-one of them, held together in two bundles with rubber bands. She put them on the table in front of Nora’s teacup.
“I brought these for you,” Rose said, “I thought maybe you’d like to read them. They’re letters your father wrote to my mother.”
Nora glanced at the bundles of yellowed envelopes with ancient postmarks, and old New Zealand stamps, the old monochrome portraits of the Queen as she had looked in the 1950s, with the postage in pence, like the ones in Tristan’s stamp collection. She sipped her tea again, slowly, glancing briefly at Rose.
“My father wrote these?”
“Rob.” Rose nodded. “He wrote them to his sister, who went to live in the us She was my mother. She married my Dad here in New Zealand. He was stationed here during the war for a bit. And they met, and married. And she came to live in the us. My Dad was Hank Chleb.”
The handwriting on the top envelope read, “Mrs. Henry Chleb, 127 Quabbin Street, Chicopee, Massachusetts, U.S.A.”
Nora did not reach for the letters.
“Forgive me for not introducing you to my mother just at this moment,” Nora said, with her voice dropping to a conspirator’s hush, “She was a bit startled at your rather dramatic entrance. She says you fell just like a tree. If it weren’t for the hearty snoring, she would have presumed you were stone dead. She’s just getting over it.”
Rose looked into her teacup and blushed.
“Thanks for not calling the police.”
“Quite all right. I don’t think they’d have known what to do with you. You’re quite a lot to lift. We’ve a bit to deal with right now, actually.” Nora continued, “Mum’s not been well, and we’re trying to place her in a rest home. There’s this house as well. Things are...unsettled.” Nora frowned into her tea and looked suddenly less determined.
“Perhaps your mother would like to see the letters?”
Nora put her cup down, careful deliberation returning to her. “Perhaps.”
A door opened and closed somewhere in the house, and Rose could hear a man’s voice. He said good morning to Nora’s mother in the kitchen. In a moment, he stood in the doorway, a trim, tall man in his early forties, losing a bit more of his dark hair every day. His reading glasses protruded from his shirt pocket.
“This is my husband, Petuh Frost,” Nora said. Peter nodded from the doorway and smiled, would have stayed there, but Rose stood and extended her hand to him. He approached and took it politely.
“This is Rose Chleb,” she pronounced it with the required amount of phlegm, “my cousin from the us” Rose noted that the first time the word “cousin” had been said between them.
“Gidday,” he said, “Nor called me last night to say you’d well, arrived. In style. I should say Kia Ora.”
“What I actually said was, ‘there’s a big woman out cold on the floor. Get help.’ Is Tris coming home with Rewa, or does he want me to fetch him round?” Nora asked Peter, standing herself now, her arms folded.
“Didn’t know, but he’d ring here after school.”
“I guess I’d better get going.” Rose said, “If I could just use your phone to call a cab?.”
“Oh, no, I’d be happy to drop you,” Peter said.
“Yes, of course, let Peter drop you. Have you booked lodgings, or are you on the grand tour of The Carpets of New Zealand?” Nora asked.
Rose fished for the key ring because she had forgotten the name of the budget motel near the airport. She let Nora copy the phone number off the key ring.
“Right-o,” Nora said, “I’ll get back to you about these letters. How long will you be staying in En Zed?”
“My return ticket was tucked in the passport.”
“So it was. And you might want to take off that heavy coat. You won’t be needing it.”
***
It was late morning, Auckland time, when she arrived at her dimly recalled room, but it was still somewhere about three in the morning two days ago inside her body. She drank the small metric container of metric milk the motel clerk had left her for her tea, dropped her winter coat on the floor, and fell on the bed.
She did not dream at all. The phone rang, and must have been ringing for some time, when she woke and dragged herself into the kitchenette where it hung on the wall.
“Huh?” she said into the phone.
“Is this Rose Chleb, please?”
“Nora, you’re getting real good at saying my name. If my grade school teachers were as conscientious as you, I wouldn’t have been so emotionally scarred. What’s up?”
Nora paused a moment before replying, taking time to digest what Rose had said. “I’d like to invite you to tea. At my mother’s house, where you were this morning. Do you remember this morning?”
“Yeah.” Rose answered, “Nice rug. I still have the pattern of the weave on my forehead. What time is it now?”
“Almost four.”
“That’s very kind of you. Thank you. What time should I...”
“About six? Peter will collect you.” Nora said.
“That’s okay, that’s too much of a bother. I can just...”
“Not at all,” Nora answered, “He’ll be quite happy to fetch you on.”
Don’t think I’ve ever been fetched before, Rose thought as she hung up the phone. She noticed the afternoon sunlight, and noted for the first time she had arrived in a subtropical environment. She glanced at her winter coat lying on the floor like the carcass of a slain animal, and shook her head. She peeked out the window. A large palm tree grew at the edge of the parking lot, and large green plants, like strange monster mutants of her house plants at home, formed a border along the fence with huge, waxy fronds in the mini jungle, where Tarzan might live. No autumn here, instead a humid, warm and wet spring. The clock and the calendar had reversed, or jumped forward.
She had slept in her clothes, the ones she had worn since she had closed and locked the back door of her mother’s house...how many days ago? Back in the olden days, before she was who she was now that she had crossed the International Dateline.
Rose unpacked her suitcases slowly and deliberately, as if reacquainting herself mentally with who she was. She took a long time showering, and getting dressed, reacquainting herself physically with who she was.
She was waiting for Peter when he arrived. He had one leg out of the car door when she closed the motel room door behind her, yanking on it once to make sure it had locked, leaving quickly like a teenager who wants to avoid introducing her date to her father. Peter scrambled around to the passenger side to open the car door for her. She extended her hand to him again, smiling as much at herself as at him for feeling an unaccountable tenderness for this sweet, quiet man with the cleft in his chin.
“I hope you like New Zealand,” he answered.
“I’ve always liked New Zealand,” she said.
“Have you been here before?”
“No. I feel stupid for what I did yesterday. Today. Whenever that was. You and Nora are very kind to overlook that.”
He smiled, “Not at all. You’ve just got a talent for making a grand entrance. You’ll meet our son, Tristan, tonight. He’s looking forward to meeting you. Lately, he’s keen on the us for an OE. This week. Who knows what scheme he’ll come up with next week. Sorry, do you that what that is? Oversees experience we call it. Very common for New Zealanders to spend part of one’s late teens or early twenties overseas.”
“How old is Tristan?”
“He’s just gone eighteen. His exams are looming, so he’ll have to make an early night of it, and I’ll take him home.”
She was going to ask where Tristan’s home was, if they all lived together, but instead she asked, “Did you have an OE, Peter?”
“I did,” he lowered the sound on the car radio. “Tristan’s always changing this. I went to California just out of university. Two years I was there. Then I came home. I never got farther than that, but I have some good memories. My mate stayed. He was in Texas, last he wrote. Never did come home.”
“Like my mother,” she said into the window at her shoulder.
“Well then, it was her intention to emigrate, wasn’t it?”
“S’pose. I don’t know what she intended. Can I ask what you do for a living, Peter?”
“Nil at the moment.” He answered, with a refreshing lack of bitterness, “I’ve been made redundant.”
“I think I need a translation.”
“My job was...it doesn’t exist anymore, even if I still do. The company I worked for, where I was an accountant, merged with another and cut staff.”
“Ah. Downsized. You were downsized.”
“I was given the sack.” He laughed.
“Me too.” She answered, “We have something in common. I got laid off several months ago. Laid off is not something rude here, is it? I was downsized, but technically, I think it was because I kept taking too much time off from work to care for my mother during her last illness. My boss didn’t like that. When you have a job in the States, you’re not supposed to have a family, too. Or, at least, you’re supposed to keep them a deep, dark secret. I don’t know the custom here, but in America, if you don’t act like a happy little slave for your boss you get axed. The worst thing in corporate America is to be labeled someone who is not a team player. It’s like being a labeled commie pinko in the 1950s was.”
“Team player, right-o.”
“That’s American slang for slave, sap, and shithead.” She said, “Excuse me.”
“Not at all. Glad to see you’re not bitter.”
“Me? No. Hope all the bastards choke on their profits and die in agony.”
The small house was where she had left it. It had not been a dream. She did not know the three-bedroom house on the quarter-acre lot was once considered a personal and national triumph, reduced now only to a zeitgeist of post-war suburban kitsch. The rotting rotary clothesline even now stereotypically stood sentinel in the dewy backyard. She walked through the front door with familiarity, and Nora poked her head in from the kitchen.
“Hello, again, Rose. We’ll be having our tea in the lounge, right Peter? There’s more room.”
“Yes,” Peter answered, and steered Rose to the room with the large round table, the shelves, and the couch, and the rug where she had fallen asleep the day before. The day before? She was still sorting out the time frame.
The table was set for four.
“Tea,” Peter whispered to her like a conspirator, “is like what you Americans call supper.”
Tristan stood in the doorway, amused by her easy warmth, and fascinated.
“Thanks, Peter,” Rose said, “I am familiar with a little bit of the lingo. Even after forty years in the States, my mother still clung to a few expressions. Hello, there.”
Tristan was through observing. He stepped into the room, and took Rose’s extended hand.
“This is Tristan,” Peter said.
“Rose. I’m glad to meet you.”
“Gidday.” Tristan had a soft voice, with a sudden sly grin at her friendliness as well as her height. Tristan was small, with dark hair and his father’s velvet brown eyes.
“I hear you have exams to study for.” Rose said.
“Yeah,” Tristan answered, “Maths tomorrow.”
Peter said, “Tris is graduating. The next two weeks are his university bursaries.”
“In the States good grades are only one way to gain entrance to a university. Lots of money, or a supernatural ability to play basketball are the others.” Rose answered.
“Tris is keen on going to the us,” Peter said, “Trouble is, he’s also quite keen on cricket, and I’ve already told him he’ll not find that in America.”
“You’d have to look really hard. Main Line, Philly, maybe, in the old days. Lotsa luck. There’s no Monday Night Cricket on TV, that’s all I know.”
Tristan smiled, and with simple maturity seemed comfortably resigned to finding things different in a different place. Rose sat at the table, mainly to allow Tristan’s handsome dark eyes to see her at eye-level. Sensitive to the neck strain she caused in smaller people, she acknowledged it as one of her many faults.
Nora entered from the kitchen.
“At the risk of pulling a Kiwi cliché, I thought lamb would do for someone who’ll likely spend the rest of her holiday at McDonald’s.”
“I will not! I’m not nearly as much a typical American tourist as I seem. Am I?” She looked down at herself, checking. “Can I help?”
“No, just take this.” Nora answered Peter, “Move that, fine. Well, Rose, tuck in, anyone who snores as loudly as you should not stand on ceremony.”
“Really, Nor.” Peter smiled at Rose. “She’ll think she isn’t one of thousands of guests who’ve fallen unconscious on the floor here over the years. I’ve lost count.”
Tristan brightened. “We have a Kiwiburger at McDonald’s.”
“Oh, Tris, I was only joking,” his mother said.
“No, no, if she’s going to McDonald’s, she should have the Kiwiburger!”
“Translation, please, somebody.” Rose said.
“It has beet root on it, and an egg, and...” Tristan said.
“Good lord, why?”
“Steady Rose, we’re talking about an imported corporate icon of supposed national identity,” Nora smirked. “Mind your head on the Trade Mark, now.”
“Beets and eggs on a hamburger. Hmm. Truly, we live in a depraved world.”
“No ketchup, warn her about that, Tristan. It’s tomato sauce here for your chips.” Nora exchanged smiles with Tristan, who delighted in Rose’s overly dramatic expressions of horror.
“I’ll fool you all and stick with lamb. This is wonderful, Nora.”
Nora sipped from her water glass, searching over the rim with her vivid eyes that never seemed to miss a thing.
“Peter tells me you had difficulties with work whilst caring for your mother,” Nora began, and cleared her throat, “I find myself faced with a similar situation now. We all do, really. Even though Peter is able to help me here with Mum, I’ve had to take a lot of leave from my job, and we juggle Tristan’s schedule with school and sport. My mother is in her room resting just now.”
“You stay with her here at night.”
“I stay with her often now, and Peter gives me breaks in the daytime. It’s not easy, is it?”
“No.”
“May I ask about your mother, and your family? As sort of a background to those letters you’ve left me.”
Rose noticed the hollow cheerfulness in Nora’s voice. As a child Rose would sometimes inexpertly mimic her mother’s clipped speech, which had made both of them laugh. As she answered Nora, Rose listened to the sound of her own speech, slower, from the back of the throat. Their vowels, as she had discovered with her mother long ago, were not too dissimilar, giving at least some sense of ease of familiarity encased by a greater sense of lonely foreignness by everything that was not similar.
“My mother passed away a few months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, our condolences,” Peter said.
“Thank you. She had those letters,” Rose continued, nodding briefly to Peter, “kept them for years. Believe she used to write to your father throughout the fifties and sixties. Not sure how regularly, but I don’t think she would throw any away. I think every letter she received in return is there, which gives you a pretty good idea of how often they wrote. The writing slacked off in the early seventies. Early 1976 was the last letter she’d received from him.”
“Well, my dad died in January of 1977, you see.”
“Late spring of 1977, she received that last letter in the bundle, obviously not from your father. Did you read it?”
“No, no. I’ve only just glanced at a few of the early ones.”
Rose thought she did not sound surprised.
“It’s from a man called Graeme Bates.”
“My uncle.”
“Yes, your mother’s brother. He wrote on behalf of your mother, notifying my mother about your father’s death.”
“I see, yes.”
Rose wondered if she was beginning to sound like a police interrogator. She began to eat again, with unfeigned enjoyment.
“This is really sooo good.”
“Nora!” The unexpectedly sharp, vigorous voice came from a back bedroom.
“Excuse me, I’ll just see what Mum’s about,” Nora said.
She rose quickly and left the room.
“Well, what are your career plans, Tristan, or do you have any?” Rose asked, watching Nora leave.
“Astronomy.” He ate with his head down, shoveling food in, utterly absorbed in what was obviously more important. Rose rested her chin on her cupped hand and watched him.
“Wow. I never knew anybody who wanted to be an astronomer.” Rose said, “Would you work for a university here? Or some government foundation?”
Peter seemed to hesitate as he answered, “This might well be a career Tristan may need to pursue elsewhere, at least at first. It’s still early days, isn’t it?”
“You’ll have to show me the Southern Cross. My mother told me about it, from the time I was a little girl. But you can’t see it from where I live.”
“This time of year you won’t find it until around midnight, low on the horizon.” Tristan said, “But I’ll show you....”
“I’ll be here for a few. Let’s wait until some night when you’re not studying for exams.”
“Right.” She thought him adorable, and that it was best to keep that to herself.
“And while you’re at it,” she said, and patted his hand, because she couldn’t keep every feeling to herself, “you can explain cricket to me.”
“Tall order,” Peter said, smiling, “first, forget everything you ever knew about baseball.”
***
Forget everything you ever knew, she thought. That could explain a lot, if a person had the patience and insight to understand. It might be the only real way to start over. She lifted the water glass to her lips and sipped slowly. Peter had taken Tristan home. Nora and Rose sat at the table with more silence than words, and Rose thought about calling a cab. It was getting late.
“My mother must have suffered terrific culture shock,” Rose said to Nora, who listened at a distance, her arms folded, her elbows tucked into her sides, as if she was still reserving judgment. Perhaps that was just the kind of person Nora was; some people were.
“She left behind everything that was familiar and traded it for a country, and a climate, and a culture completely alien to her. And she had to raise her children as products of that place. Could that have made her feel, I wonder, that her children did not really belong to her?”
Nora marveled at how soft Rose’s voice had become. She was easier to listen to like this.
Then they heard a dull thud from another part of the house. They both jerked up at once, suddenly roused and thinking the same thing, and they both ran to the sound, Rose on Nora’s heels.
Nora’s mother lay on the floor of her bedroom.
“Oh, no!” Nora gasped and dropped herself before her mother, hesitating to touch her. “What’s happened? Are you hurt?” Nora’s arms were still folded against her chest.
Her mother did not answer, but a single, tortured cough followed, and she flailed a hand weakly for something to grasp. Rose took it, and knelt over the old woman. She stroked the hand and placed it on the lady’s abdomen. Rose and Nora watched with relief as the woman’s breathing resumed with wonderful regularity. With both hands, Rose touched and grasped the old woman at her shoulders and arms, at her ribs and hips, her legs, finally placing her large hands gently against the woman’s face in a gesture of comfort. Rose suddenly realized that was what was missing at the end of the airport security gropes, some gesture of reassurance.
The old woman looked at her with an expression of disdain and reluctant curiosity.
“I don’t think anything’s broken,” Rose said.
“Shall I get an ambulance?” Nora asked, “What do you think?”
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Rose asked her. “X-rays might be a good idea, anyway.”
“No!” The old woman answered with a voice as firm as her attitude. Rose smiled.
“Okay.” she said, “Then we’ll just put you back.”
She gently snaked her arms under the woman’s back and legs, and, still kneeling, lifted her easily. She placed her back in her bed. She covered her. Standing, Rose looked expectantly down at Nora. Nora ran a quick hand through her short, dark hair, and jump-started her own regular breathing.
“Um, Mum, this is...this is Rose. Chleb. Dad’s niece. From America.”
Rose nodded, smiling her idiotic passport photo smile, standing at the ready like an expectant TV game show contestant being introduced by the host to the audience.
“This is my mother, Edith Fitzmichael.”
Mrs. Fitzmichael said nothing, but nodded in acknowledgment.
“Hello, Ma’am,” Rose said, speaking louder and more slowly, and more deliberately it seemed to Nora, “I’m sorry to have made such a bad first impression on you. But I’m very glad to be here in your beautiful country. It’s been a long time since our families were in touch.”
“Thank you, Rose,” Mrs. Fitzmichael said to Nora’s amazement, “I’m very glad you’ve come to see us. You are very welcome here.”
“I’ve brought some old letters with me, letters your husband had written to my mother over the years,” Rose said, her voice dropping, her tone less formal with what to Nora seemed an amazingly sudden demeanor of comfort and adaptability. Rose had been told to make herself at home, and this is obviously what she was going to do. Nora waited for an even more casual demonstration, perhaps Rose sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed, or lighting up a cigarette and felt almost as if she were watching a film of an unknown American woman visiting with her irascible mother.
But clearly, Rose did not smoke and was not going to avail herself use of the furniture. She took liberties in other ways.
“I was struck by the warmth with which he described his family,” Rose went on comfortably, “He was very proud of you all and wanted my mother to know that.”
It sounded rehearsed. Nora glanced at her mother, who said nothing, but resolutely shut her eyes.
“Good night, Aunt Edith,” Rose said after a moment, and leaned her long frame down to leave a light kiss on Nora’s mother’s cheek. Nora glanced warily at her mother again. Her mother opened her eyes, but only looked at the ceiling with same knitted brow expression she used to watch for storm clouds from the kitchen window.
“Yes, yes, good night,” she said brusquely.
Nora led the way out of her mother’s bedroom.
Rose used the phone in the kitchen to call a cab. Nora waited in the lounge with her mother’s china figurines, the television, the large round table and the letters from her father that Rose had brought and left on an end table. Nora took down a framed print of Big Ben behind dusty glass, and slipped it into a half-filled cardboard box she had gotten from the supermarket. It was the jumble sale box. The box for things to keep was under the table, the family photographs, and some old school mementos belonging to her brother Edwin that he had never taken when he had left home, as well as some Christmas ornaments and what was left of her father’s old army kit. Nora stared at it all.
Rose finished her call and came into the lounge, glancing involuntarily at the brick-a-brac on the cabinets and then her eyes settled again on Nora. She smiled, awkwardly, then picked up the packet of letters she had seemingly been guarding the whole evening. She pulled one out from the others and handed it to Nora, who took it from her with more a sense of resignation than curiosity. Rose placed the bundle of letters on the table, pointedly to demonstrate she was leaving them, and folded her arms with what looked like a sense of satisfaction.
“You should really take a look at that one,” Rose said, pleased. “Your father writes about you. He writes about a school assembly where you’d gotten some awards. I think you were twelve or something. It’s sweet. Daddy’s little girl.”
Nora looked at the envelope, which had been slit open at the top, sent through the obstacle course of international mail over thirty years ago.
“Forgive me,” Nora said, “would you mind if I just took my time with these? This is all a bit overwhelming.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to push them at you.”
“What is it you intend to do here, Rose? Go sightseeing?”
“Well...I...yes, I suppose. I’ve always wanted to come here to see where my mother grew up. I wanted to see if I could ....find anything....” Rose’s voice trailed off as if she were distracted by something, thinking, find my family, find you, but she brought her eyes back to Nora’s and just smiled and shrugged. “I guess I’ll just take a look around Auckland.”
“You’ve already managed to touch base with us, well done on that, and just in time, too. As you can see, I’ve already been sorting through some of my mother’s things here, and we expect to put her house up for sale in the coming weeks. If you had postponed your trip, you mayn’t have found us at all.”
Rose considered this horror as she kept a lookout for the taxi.
“I’m not sure what I would have done next if I hadn’t found you at this address.” Rose said, “It was all I could think of on the flight over.”
Nora did not answer, and when the taxi arrived, she dropped the letter onto the table with others, came to Rose for a quick, polite requisite farewell hug, and wished that Rose might enjoy the rest of her stay in New Zealand. Rose took a long last look at the little house with the orange tiled roof under the cabbage palm in the dark, not knowing whether to feel she had made a huge accomplishment this day, or if the feeling of emptiness she took away with her meant anything at all.
***
Nora peeked in on her mother, who was sleeping now. Her features were untroubled and her breathing was light.
Nora went back to the lounge and pondered the stack of letters a moment as well as the loose one she had chosen not to read in front of Rose. She reached for the bundle instead, thumbed through the aging envelopes and noted they were in chronological order according to the postmarks. She pulled the last one out and examined it. It was a business-sized envelope and the address was typewritten. The return address was not the address of this house, but recognized it as being sent from her uncle’s home in Canterbury on the South Island. It had been written in January, 1977.
“Dear Mrs. Chleb,
My name is Graeme Bates, and I am the brother of your sister-in-law, Mrs. Edith Fitzmichael. I have the very sad job of informing you that your brother Rob has passed away, and offer you my sincere condolences.....”
Nora tossed the letter onto the table with the other Rose handed to her, and swore.