bed to kiss her lips, and she gave him her cheek instead. He didn’t argue.
On his way out of her bedroom, he paused and looked back.
“Will you let me give you one piece of advice?” he asked.
“Do I have to?” she asked.
“I have been on this earth twenty years longer than you.”
“All right, tell me,” she said.
“When distant relatives contact you out of nowhere, it’s never good. Never. Never,” he said.
“Never?”
“Never. They either want money or they want something from you more valuable than money. The more I think about it, the more I think you should let me take that package down to the Dumpster.”
“This was my family, McQueen.”
“Was,” McQueen said. “Thirteen years ago and they haven’t contacted you in all that time? What’s the lady’s name who opened her box and screwed us all over?”
“Pandora?”
“Right.” He pointed at her and nodded. “Don’t be like her.”
“You’re telling me that’s Pandora’s padded envelope?” Allison asked.
“Pandora’s box sounds a lot better,” he said. “I have to go. Meeting in half an hour. You’ll at least think about it?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Have a good life.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You, too, darlin’.”
She waited for him to leave. He didn’t.
“I never thought it would end like this,” he said, still looking at her. “I’ve been waiting six years for you to get shed of me. I thought any day now you’d tell me it was over, that you’d met someone, that you’d fallen in love.”
There was nothing safe Allison could say to that so she said nothing at all. McQueen waited. She kept her silence. He turned and then, at last, he was gone.
The door shut behind him and Allison sat on the bed, her chin to her chest. She didn’t cry. She wanted to but she couldn’t find her tears. What she wanted was a shoulder to cry on but she had none. The last shoulders in her life that weren’t her own had just walked out of the door.
She was twenty-five and college-educated. She had a roof over her head and she had money. She had food and she had clothes. She had a car and she had a letter of recommendation from the wealthiest man in the state she could use to get a job pretty much anywhere. She was fine. She was fine. She was fine. She told herself a thousand times she was fine.
She wasn’t fine.
She was alone.
Alone on her bed, she was a seven-year-old girl again, staring at the front door waiting for someone to come through it and knowing, deep down, that no one ever would.
Her worst nightmare. She was all alone.
Or was she?
Allison grabbed her robe, pulled it on and went into the kitchen again. She stood by the table, looking at the envelope. Allison told herself she was doing it to spite McQueen, but even she knew she wasn’t telling herself the truth.
She picked up the envelope and ripped it open.
Inside the envelope she found a letter. Before she lost her courage, she unfolded it and read.
Dear Allison,
What to say? I’ll be quick. It’s been thirteen years and I know I should leave you alone but you’ve been on my mind a lot lately so I’ll get to the point fast. Dad is dying. Stage five renal failure. He doesn’t know I’m writing you. I didn’t want to get his hopes up. Fact is, he’s always missed you. Any time your name comes up, you can tell he’s full of regret. So am I. If you have it in your heart to come see him one last time, I’d be forever grateful. If you don’t, I don’t blame you. But if you do come, we’re still at the old house, and you’re sure to find one of us here day or night. Dad’s determined to die at home in his own bed, and we’re going to do the best we can to honor his wishes. If you want to come, all I ask is please come soon. He doesn’t have long.
There’s so much more I want to say to you, but I’ll end here. I’ve taken up enough of your time.
Roland
P.S. Found this while digging through the attic. If you read as much now as you used to, you probably want it back.
P.S. #2. I think about you every time it rains.
A humble letter, humble and polite. Humble and polite and adult. It wasn’t until Allison read that letter that it hit her: Roland Capello wasn’t sixteen anymore. What sixteen-year-old boy says things like “I’ve taken up enough of your time”? What sixteen-year-old boy talks about stage five renal failure? What sixteen-year-old boy knows anything about regret?
In her mind Roland had been forever sixteen. Tall and thin with long coltish legs covered in light blond hair. Board shorts, ripped and faded T-shirts, hair long enough he could tuck it behind his ears. Wraparound sunglasses like Bono’s, worn up on his head more often than over his eyes to hold his hair back.
Allison had to walk away from the letter for a few minutes simply to recover from the simple realization that as much time had passed for Roland as it had for her. She was thirteen years older and so was he. Roland’s birthday was in July. Roland, eternally lanky and lean and sixteen, was now thirty. A grown man. And here she was, twenty-five and freshly dumped. Adults now, both of them.
She stood in the middle of her living room and breathed through her hands. When she looked up, she was jarred by her surroundings—the gray walls and the mullioned window and the red sofa with its intricately carved oak arms. For a split second she’d been back in the past where the walls were floor-to-ceiling windows instead of floor-to-ceiling bookcases and outside the door there was ocean, not asphalt.
Still shaking, Allison walked back to the table and the package and the letter. Dr. Capello was dying. She wasn’t ready to deal with that yet so she turned her attention instead to whatever it was Roland had sent her. She pulled it from the padded envelope and removed the newspaper wrapped around it. And as soon as she saw it, tears scalded her eyes.
It was a book, of course, a battered old yellow paperback with a winged centaur on the cover and three children riding on its back. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
“Oh, Roland...” she breathed. “You remembered.”
She sat down because she couldn’t stand anymore. Allison slowly flipped through the book. The pages had grown so soft and supple with age it felt like she was holding not a book but another hand in her hand. She opened it to the middle and pressed her face into the pages. She inhaled the scent of paper, ink and glue, and if they could make a perfume that
