What the Living Owe

Later, in the motel outside Duluth, Mara laid the remaining letters out on the bedspread like a hand of solitaire she didn't know the rules to.

Twenty-six left. Twenty-six people walking around with a Carol-shaped silence in them, not knowing an apology was already written, already stamped, already on its way — just forty years late and traveling by daughter now instead of by mail.

She called her supervisor and asked for the rest of her leave. She was owed nine weeks. She had never taken any of it, because hospice nurses are famous for believing the rules of rest apply to everyone but themselves.

"Family emergency?" her supervisor asked.

Mara looked at the envelopes. The florist. The man in Tacoma. The girl from the bus, if she can be found.

"Family," she said. "I'm still working out which kind."

Outside, the highway hushed and hushed like a tide that had somewhere to be. Mara turned off the lamp and lay in the dark doing the math she always warned the families against: if her mother had mailed the first letter at twenty-five, whom might she have become by thirty? If courage compounds like interest, what was the balance her mother had died holding?

Grief is just love with nowhere to go. Fine. But her mother had left addresses.

In the morning she bought a road atlas at a gas station, the old paper kind, because it felt right that this particular journey should be navigated by something you could hold. The kid at the register asked if she was going somewhere fun.

"Tacoma," she said. "Eventually everywhere."

She drew a line across three states in ballpoint pen and drove into the part of the story her mother had never had the courage to write.