y the time I dragged myself over to Mrs. Delavecchio’s, it was already past the warm-dinner hour. Mrs. Delavecchio’s roast chicken sat deep in a pan on the table, herbs and lemons floating in a congealing gravy. I didn’t think I could stomach it.

“Are there leftovers from lunch?” I asked.

Mrs. Delavecchio waved towards the fridge. “Maybe. Not my job to look.”

Only one Tupperware remained in the fridge. Inside it, the breadcrumbs covering the mystery meal resisted my fork’s attempts to break through. I put the container back and returned to the dining table. Cold, jellified chicken it was. I cut as small a piece as I could manage, then ladled some lukewarm zucchini casserole next to it. Mrs. Delavecchio was always making casseroles for me to eat. I suspected she suspected that I liked casseroles, since we’d brought her one once, my mother having insisted on doing so, although I couldn’t remember why. I did remember that, upon receipt of our casserole (which might be what was in the Tupperware in the fridge, come to think of it, since Mrs. Delavecchio’s casseroles tended to be more on the mushy side than the concrete one), Mrs. Delavecchio had patted my mother’s hand gently, like my mother needed solace rather than the other way around.

“You look like that at my slaved-over meal?” Mrs. Delavecchio said to me. “Perhaps it would be more tasty if you come for lunch like you promise. Or even come for dinner at appropriate hour. But no, you too busy to keep appointments.” She humphed and took a new paper napkin from the metal napkin holder in the center of the table, replacing the one that she had shredded into her lap; white paper flakes stood out against the black of her dress. Mrs. Delavecchio only ever wore black, from her hair, which she dyed, to the squat black heels of her shoes. Even her compression stockings were black (also dyed, since the stores in town sold only white or peach ones.)

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Delavecchio.” I stared at my vegetables. She was right; I’d spent the rest of the day mooning about the kitchen, feeling sorry for myself, rather than keeping my lunch appointment with her. Unsatisfactory student, unsatisfactory daughter, unsatisfactory neighbor-friend. At least I’d let Amber feel superior to me that morning, so I couldn’t say I was an unsatisfactory nemesis, not that that was any consolation.

“And what you do all the day, anyway?” Mrs. Delavecchio interrupted my shame spiral. “Spend all the day thinking about faeries? That’s right,” she said, to my look of surprise. “Your mother says faeries are in your brain.” Mrs. Delavecchio reached for a third paper napkin to destroy. “You writing a storybook. I tell you, any faeries that lived around here would be long gone by now.”

“What? Why?” I asked eagerly. I’d never considered Mrs. Delavecchio an ally in my quest for faerie knowledge. She seemed so (I struggled to think of a word) staid. So earthy. But maybe faeries were attracted to that? And maybe Mrs. Delavecchio saw the faeries too?

“Where did the faeries go?” I asked.

“Go? How about stay? Faeries live in nut trees,” Mrs. Delavecchio informed me resolutely. “My hazelnut tree died three summers ago from blight, so nowhere for faeries to make their nest.”

“So, we’ll have to plant some nut trees,” I said, more to myself than to Mrs. Delavecchio.

“Why bother with more trees?” Mrs. Delavecchio replied. “Yours fell over again. Trees don’t like to grow here in the swamp.”

“We don’t live in a swamp. We live by a marsh.”

“In, by, swamp, marsh.” Mrs. Delavecchio waved her hand dismissively. “Same difference.”

“There is a difference,” I insisted. “If a swamp and a marsh were the same, they’d both be called the same thing, like swarsh. Plus, trees do grow in a swamp: mangroves are trees. And,” I continued, “I don’t believe you about nut trees. How many nut trees are there in Ireland? There are lots of stories about faeries from Ireland.”

“Lem was just like you at your age. Thinking he knew everything.”

“Who’s Lem?”

Mrs. Delavecchio crossed herself. “My son.”

I dropped my zucchini-laden fork onto the table. “You’ve never told me you had a son. When does he visit? I want to meet him.”

“You do not get to meet him.”

“Please?” I had to think of a reason why Mrs. Delavecchio wanted to keep Lem all to herself. “Are you saying no because I was selfish and late today? Because I’m sorry about that. And I’m sorry I never asked about your life, either,” I added. “I should have. I tell you almost everything about mine and then I don’t ask about yours, so I can see why you’d be angry with me. Oh wait —” I stopped. Maybe Lem was dead. That would explain why I wouldn’t get to meet him. “I’m sorry if he died,” I whispered.

“He hasn’t died. He lives away. Here.” She hoisted herself up to lurch to one of the two chest freezers she kept along the wall of her dining room (she needed both to contain her garden’s frozen bounty). “I am sorry, Enid, for snapping at you, even if you were late. I get you gelato to apologize.”

“No, it was my fault. It was,” I admitted.

“Faeries,” Mrs. Delavecchio muttered, scooping me a large bowl of stracciatella and decorating it with little wafer cookies. “Not like you can clap-clap for Tinkerbell; no one believes anymore.”

“I believe.”

“Children believe anything,” she snorted. All right then: Mrs. Delavecchio probably wasn’t going to be an ally in my faerie investigations after all. She thunked the bowl of ice cream down in front of me. “Here.”

I moved my dinner plate aside and grabbed a spoon. If we weren’t going to talk about faeries, we’d go back to the previous topic of conversation. “So, Mrs. Delavecchio,” I said, my mouth full of dessert. “How is Lem?” I emphasized the is to make it sound like Lem and I were intimately acquainted.

“My big mouth,” Mrs. Delavecchio said to the wall.

“Yeah, why haven’t you ever mentioned him before?”

“Because he is my son, yes, but he is also a disgrace. I think about him and my heart breaks.” She beat on her chest erratically. “I tell you, though, I share the burden.” Her lips twisted into a thinking sort of smile. “It’s not even like he got in with bad crowd. Lem, broken, rotten to the core, is the bad crowd.”

“What sort of bad crowd?”

“He is in prison. That sort of bad crowd.”

Dear Lem,

I apologize for not having written you before, but I only learned of your existence earlier this evening, when your mother, justifiably angry with me, let it slip that you were once the same age as I am, an age I am not going to reveal to you lest you somehow determine that my age makes my advice somewhat less sound. Hopefully, though, at my age you weren’t already a criminal. You should know that I am not already a criminal, nor am I planning on becoming one. I am merely a Concerned Friend, writing you this letter while your mother watches nature documentaries in the TV room. She loves nature documentaries and gets the full cable package so that she can watch as many as possible, and, since a lot of the channels are the same, but for different time zones, if she watches something she enjoys on the Atlantic channel, she can watch it again on Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. If the show is only thirty minutes, she can also start her viewing on Newfoundland time, and then get to watch whatever it is six times, rather than five.

As you can tell by how much I know about your mother’s television habits, I spend a lot of time with her, and she never mentioned you once, until today. I find this distressing. Also somewhat unbelievable. As there are no pictures of you anywhere in the house that I can see, I initially came to the conclusion that you do not exist and that Mrs. Delavecchio had invented you as a way to illustrate a point about my own thoughtlessness.

(Obviously, since you are receiving this letter, I have reassessed my stance re: your existence. I found your name and address in Mrs. Delavecchio’s address book, and even I don’t believe she has the guile for such a well-thought-out ruse or that she would put a fake prison address in her address book so that she could say that she has experience with people my age.)

Lem, I know you haven’t written to Mrs. Delavecchio any time in the past year, since I collect Mrs. Delavecchio’s mail from the community mailbox for her. She is your mother, and she is so lonely. She needn’t be so lonely because she has you, and you can write to her to cheer her up. If writing is difficult for you (because your criminality interfered with adequate schooling, perhaps?), maybe you have a friend to whom you could dictate a loving letter to your own mother? Her birthday is October 12th, in case you have forgotten. You could start preparing a birthday card, even now in June. I’ll also enclose stamps with my letter in case these are difficult to obtain within a correctional facility. So now you have no excuses not to write.

Prison can be tough (I’ve watched two seasons of Oz and half an episode of Orange Is the New Black, so I know what I’m talking about), but please write to your mother. There is no reason to make your only mother unhappy, Lem. As an adult, this is something I’d expect you to already know. She told me you are broken. Well, fix yourself up and send her a letter!

Sincerely,

A Concerned Friend