Dear Little Jo,
Well, I guess now you know where your scarf ended up. You did leave it in my car that night after Lyle’s show. Sorry I didn’t say so when you asked about it. Actually, you didn’t even leave it. When we were parked at the curb around the block from your house, the scarf was slipping out of your collar down the back of your seat. I reached around and gave it a little tug so it dropped onto the floor in the back seat.
I’m aware it was weird of me. It wasn’t straight-up theft. I mean I didn’t want Lyle’s old hippie scarf for myself or anything. I just wanted some kind of souvenir of you, something that smelled like you, Jo. I’m aware it’s a little weird.
“I feel like I should have brought flowers,” you said, at my front door. I was thinking I should have changed into something better than jeans and a T-shirt at least. I’d been roving around the house all evening looking at everything through fresh eyes—through your eyes—and trying to hide all the most obviously horrible things. Elementary school photos, my mom’s prescription bottles, my bathrobe with all the strings hanging down at the hem. I mean I’d started to regret inviting you over, even though it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that my mom and Uncle Viktor were away overnight. A once-a-year opportunity, anyway.
It’s how they first got together, actually. The year after my father died, Mom skipped her orchid show in Chicago, and the next year Uncle Viktor offered to go with her.
I don’t know if I ever told you that my mom works for a plant-care company that does most of the big office buildings downtown. But her hobby is orchids. She has grow lights in the basement and a little fiberglass greenhouse out back. They go to the orchid show every year, Mom and Viktor.
You came into the house and put down your mandolin case, and for some reason I unzipped your coat for you and took it off your arms like you were four years old. Tugging one sleeve and then the next so you turned a complete circle to release it. You closed your fist inside your cuff at the last second and pulled the coat, and me, toward you. Went up on your toes to kiss me with your cold mouth.
I offered you a cola, and then we didn’t have any, which for some reason made us laugh. Everything seemed funny, even not having cola. We drank water and joked around.
You went around looking at everything in my house, but somehow none of it looked as horrible as it did before you showed up. You asked me to plug in the lights on the Christmas tree. We sat with our feet up on the coffee table and my arm around your shoulders. We talked about how they used to make those ornaments by hand with a glassblower and a fire. We laughed about that stupid Christmas-ornament argument we had that time, about which of us was the sparkly glass object that would break under pressure.
You said someday we should take a workshop together, a class in glassblowing.
“When?” I said. It was hard to picture a class like that with both of us in it.
“Someday,” you said. “After high school? I don’t know.”
For the space of maybe fifteen seconds, I was completely and perfectly happy. I mean imagine if you and I still knew each other someday and it wouldn’t be a big deal to sign up for a glassblowing class. Imagine if there was even such a class.
Sincerely,
AK
PS: I just read your last letter, which you handed me this morning in the hall but I forgot to open until just now. On the back of the envelope you wrote the phone number of your grandma’s house up in Moorhead, since that’s where you’ll be staying over Christmas. I’m going to drop this letter off at your house tomorrow and see if you have another one for me by then too. I have to say I’m not really looking forward to the holidays this year. Two weeks seems like kind of a long time without any mail.
Yes, you can write about it. Actually I want you to write about it. I mean it’s something I wish wasn’t part of our universe at all. But it’s in there. Maybe if you write about it I will quit feeling like it crowds everything else out.