The waitress didn’t answer. Instead she crouched down, reached beneath the booth, and peeled something loose from the underside of the table.
A small envelope. Held there with tape.
My name was written across the front, in my father’s handwriting.
Rachel.
I went cold all over. “How long has that been there?”
“Your father tapes a new one under here before every date,” she said. “I don’t know what’s in them. I’ve never looked.”
I reached for it.
“Please don’t open that.”
I turned around.
A woman was standing near the bar. Mid-sixties, silver hair pinned back, a blue coat, both hands wrapped tight around a handbag like she might need to run. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
I looked from her to the photograph on the wall. And then back.
The same narrow jaw. The same deep-set eyes. Older now, lined, but unmistakable. Even underneath all those scratches, I knew.
“You were here last night,” I said slowly. “You’re the woman who canceled on my dad.”
She nodded once.
“You’re her.” I pointed at the ruined face in the photograph. “You’re the one he was supposed to see again.”
“I was the woman he met,” she said. “It wasn’t a date.”
The waitress quietly stepped away and left us alone.
“Then who are you?” I asked.
The woman glanced at the photo. “My name is Helen.”
“How do you know my father?”
“Longer than you’ve been alive.”
“So you were together. At some point. The two of you.”
Her face barely moved. “No. We never were.”
“Don’t lie to me. Please. I’ve had eighteen months of people not telling me things.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“You’re standing beside him in a photo from 1987. Your face has been clawed out of it. He’s been bringing woman after woman to this exact table for a year and a half, and now suddenly you’re the one sitting across from him. So don’t tell me it’s nothing.”
“It wasn’t a date,” she said again.
“Then what was it?”
Helen looked down at the envelope in my hand with my name on it. And she said, quietly, “Your father was asking me whether eight years was long enough.”
She pulled out the chair across from the booth and gestured for me to sit.
“No,” I said. “You can tell me standing.”
She studied me for a few seconds, the way you study someone you’re deciding how much to trust. Then she said the most absurd sentence I have ever heard in my life.
“Your mother chose every single woman your father has dated.”
I laughed. One short, disbelieving bark of a laugh, because it was insane.
“My mother has been dead for eight years.”
“I know.”
“So try again.”
Helen didn’t argue. She opened her handbag and drew out a folded sheet of paper, yellowed and soft with age. She didn’t hand it to me. She just laid it flat on the table between us.
At the top, in handwriting I would know anywhere, in handwriting I still saw in my dreams sometimes, it said:
Tom—
If you’re reading this, you finally ignored me long enough to open the blue box.
My knees went out from under me. I sat down in the chair I’d just refused.
“There are more,” Helen said.
“More what?”
“Pages. This is only one.”
“Where are the rest?”
“Your father has them.”
I reached for the paper. Helen pressed her palm flat over it, holding it to the table.
“Rachel,” she said. “Before you read anything. You need to understand some things. Your mother was sick for almost two years before you knew how serious it was.”
I remembered those months. God, I remembered them now, in a new and terrible light. Mom saying she was just tired. Mom brushing off the vacation Dad kept trying to plan. Mom on the phone telling me the treatment was going great, it was working, don’t you worry about coming home.
By the time she finally admitted she was dying, we had eleven weeks left. Eleven.
“You knew?” I said. “Back then? Before—”
“Before either of you did. Yes.”
I pushed back from the table. “Were you her doctor?”
“No.”
