Chapter 2

The screen door banged shut behind Gus.

He stood just inside it with his hat in his hand.

At the table nobody moved.

Char's chair went back with a scrape.

Roy stood up.

Ruth stayed seated.

"Go home, Gus," she said.

"This is family business."

Gus didn't move.

"That's my face on your girl," he said.

Ruth looked at Laney.

Then she looked away.

"You don't know what you're saying," she said.

"You were never here."

"I'm here now," Gus said.

Ruth stood.

She straightened her pearls.

She turned to the far end of the table.

Two of her church circle sat there, plates untouched.

"Ella," Ruth said.

"You remember how Char was at seventeen."

Ella lowered her eyes.

"A wild girl," Ruth said.

"That's all this is."

Char flinched.

Roy started to speak.

Ruth cut him off.

"Roy. Sit down."

He sat.

For one second Ruth had the room back.

The aunts nodded along.

Ella said something soft about everyone being tired.

Laney's hands stayed steady on the oilcloth.

Then Gus reached inside his jacket.

He laid a second photograph on the table.

A boy of seventeen in a work shirt.

Lean.

Gray-eyed.

The same jaw.

The same face.

Char made a small sound.

Gus turned his head.

Behind his left ear was a strawberry mark.

Laney turned her own head.

Her braid slid off her neck.

The same mark.

In the same place.

The aunts leaned in over the table.

Nobody said tired now.

The room looked from Gus to Laney and back.

Then the story came out in pieces.

Gus had a truck and a ring he never got to give.

Char had a girl who looked just like him.

The town had an old story that Gus walked off.

Char had believed it eighteen years.

Then Char stood up slow.

Her hands were shaking.

"I wrote you," she said.

"Every week for a year."

Gus went still.

"After that they came back to me," Char said.

"Stamped return to sender."

"In block letters I never knew."

"I thought you were having somebody toss them."

Gus shook his head once.

"I never got a single one," he said.

"And every letter I wrote you came back to me the same way."

The porch went dead quiet.

Char's face broke open.

"So the mail ran both ways," she said.

"And neither of us ever saw a word."

Hollis had come up onto the step.

He wouldn't look at Ruth.

He took Laney's hand.

He pressed something cold and small into it.

An old brass key.

Laney closed her fingers around it.

She looked down the hall.

Past the table.

The cedar chest sat under the coat hooks with a fist of a padlock on it.

She looked back at her mother.

"Then who's been sending your letters back, Mama?" she asked.

Ruth's hand closed tight on the pearls at her throat.