Read old letters
Annie let herself into her mother’s house, feeling how still and humid the air was. Motes of dust drifted in the sunlight from the smeary window, and the panes rattled each time a bus went by on the main road. This was the house she’d grown up in, spent her whole life in until she’d met and moved in with Mike. If Annie closed her eyes she could conjure up her mother as she used to be. Dependable, if interfering at times. Always there when Annie fell over and cut her knee, or had a fight with Jane, or left Mike and ran away. Until, suddenly, she hadn’t been. Annie knew now that nobody would always be there.
“You were right, Mum,” she whispered. “There’s no such thing as a perfect life. But there is such a thing as a happy life. Maybe.”
It was so familiar—the china figurines on the mantelpiece, now in need of a good dusting. The sagging armchair where her mother had sat doing crosswords, watching TV, reading her books. The worn patterned carpet that had been there since Annie was a child. They’d never replaced anything. We can’t afford it, her mother would say. We’re not made of money. Because of your father.
And now she knew that her father had tried, at least at the end. It was too easy to imagine things being different. Eyes closed, she’d spent weekends and holidays with her father, got to know him; they’d been close and she’d felt loved. She’d had a sister. Eyes open, she was back in the noisy living room, and her father was dead. And she knew her mother would not be back here again. Annie would have to find her somewhere else to live. This house, with all its sad memories, would have to be sold.
She found the letter in the bottom drawer of her mother’s bedside table, inside a shoe box that had once held sensible flat shoes from Clarks. Annie laid her hand on it, breath held. Then, as if Polly was over her shoulder chivvying her on, she took it out of its envelope. Standard blue notepaper, scrawled writing. This was her father’s handwriting. Dear Annie. I hope your mother will pass this letter on to you… Annie’s eyes blurred, and she tucked the paper away carefully. Something to read later, maybe, when she felt stronger, when she could process all of this.
There was something else in the box, too—a scrap of fabric, the color of gone-off salmon. A fragment of the prom dress her mother had made so carefully, and Annie had rejected. The one she’d thought meant her mother didn’t care, not seeing that it really meant the opposite. Annie fished something else out. A tiny bracelet of plastic, so small she could barely fit two fingers through it. Anne Maureen Clarke. Her hospital tag as a baby. Kept all this time, just as she’d saved Jacob’s.
Burning tears choked her again, and the contents of the box began to blur. Annie sat on the pink shag carpet of her mother’s room, choked with the smell of Anaïs Anaïs and damp, and she cried for everything she’d lost, and everything she’d never had to begin with.