Chapter 7
Story: The Church Secretary Typed the Will for Thirty Years — Then the Widow Spoke Too Loudly
The letter to the trustee was short. Doyle wrote it in the church office, at Wanda's desk, on the last sheet of the church's letterhead, and he dated it a Saturday — one week to the day after his father's funeral.
He wrote, in the plainest language he could find: "I am the co-trustee of the trust holding the property at 1414 Riverside Drive. I am writing to inform you that I am exercising the provision described in the trust document, dated eight weeks before my father's death, which allows the trust to be dissolved and the property sold. Please proceed with the sale. A copy of this letter has been retained in the church office."
He signed it, underlined his name, and handed it to Wanda.
"You don't want to sit with it a day?" she asked.
"Eight weeks," he said. "That's how long he sat with it. I'm done sitting."
Wanda folded the letter, put it in a church envelope, and sealed it. She wrote the trustee's address on the front in her careful hand, and then she looked up at him across the desk, and there was something in her eyes that had not been there the morning before.
"The house will sell," she said. "River city, four bedrooms, river view. It'll go for a good price. Half to the estate, half to me."
"Yes."
"Your mother will have to move."
"Yes."
"She'll have to find an apartment, or a smaller house, or —" Wanda shook her head. "She'll have to face it. The estate belongs to family alone. She said it herself. And now the house will go to someone else, and the estate will still hold half, but the largest account has been reduced by the lump sum, and there is no new house."
"She said she wanted a new house," Doyle said. "She'll have one. A smaller one. A rental. Something she can afford on what's left."
"And you?"
"I'll be fine." He stood up and put his hands in his pockets, feeling the brass key, the paper of the first letter, the worn edge of the key fob he had been given at sixteen. "I have a job. I have an apartment. I have a father who left me two letters and told me he was proud of me. I am more whole than I have been in twenty years."
Wanda stood too. She came around the desk, and for a moment they stood facing each other in the small office, with the morning light coming through the window and the safe closed on the floor behind the desk.
"I never married again," she said. "Not once. There were a few men who came to the church and asked, over the years. The widowers, the divorced men, the ones who thought a woman who typed church papers would make a good wife. I told them all no."
"Why?"
"Because I was already in love with someone, and he was married to someone else, and I had watched his father type letters to the woman who was his wife, and I had never seen a man write so carefully to a woman who did not read them."
The words went into Doyle and stayed there. He looked down at her, at the short gray-brown hair, the square kind face, the deep smile lines that had deepened over the years he had spent walking away from her, and he said:
"You should have said."
"Say what? By the time I was free, you were not. By the time you were free, I had made peace with it. There was nothing to say that would have changed anything."
"You don't know that."
Wanda smiled. It was the first time he had seen her smile since the funeral, and the smile lines at her eyes deepened, and the whole room seemed to warm by a degree.
"I know that I typed his papers for thirty years," she said. "And I know that he never once dictated a letter to you that he did not mean. And I know that the last thing he wrote, after the will, after the condition, after the folders had been collated and stacked by the copier, was a page of yellow legal paper with your name on it. And I know that he spent eight weeks writing it, and rewriting it, and reading it aloud to himself in the study when he thought I could not hear him."
Doyle stood very still.
"He read it aloud," he said. "The second letter."
"He read it to the empty room. He read it the way a man reads something he is trying to memorize, the way a man reads a speech he is afraid to give. And I heard the words 'I have loved you all your life,' and I heard him stop and start again, and I heard him read 'I have not always liked being the man who raised you,' and I knew — I knew he was writing to you, and I knew I was hearing something I was never meant to repeat."
"Then why are you repeating it now?"
"Because he is dead, and you are here, and you have read the letters, and you have a brass key in your pocket, and you have made a choice." Wanda looked at him steadily. "He told me, the week after he sealed the second envelope, that if you ever came to the church office again, I should tell you one thing. He said —" She stopped, and he watched her remember the words, holding them the way she had held his papers for thirty years. "He said, 'Tell him the understanding was always in the choice, not in the envelope. I just needed him to reach the point where he could make one.'"
The office was quiet. Beyond the window, the parking lot was bright now with the sun that had finally burned through the gray, and the wet gravel glistened as if the rain had left a blessing behind.
Doyle reached into his pocket and pulled out the brass key. He looked at it, old and green at the edges, the key to a desk drawer his father had locked with the two letters inside. And then he reached out and put it on the desk, in front of Wanda, and said:
"The desk drawer is unlocked now. The key is yours. If you want it."
Wanda looked at the key for a long moment. Then she reached out, slowly, and picked it up, and closed her hand around it, and held it the way a woman holds the first key to a house she will never have to leave.
"I'll keep it," she said. "For the church office. For the filing cabinet. For the lock that holds the records of every family who ever sat in those pews."
They stood that way, the two of them, in the small office that smelled of toner and paper dust and the coffee that had gone cold in the cup Wanda had brought an hour before, and neither of them spoke.
Then Doyle said, "I have to go see my mother."
"She'll be at the house."
"I know." He moved toward the door, and then he stopped, and turned back. "Wanda."
"Yes."
"When this is over — when the house is sold and the trust is dissolved and my mother has moved — I would like to take you to dinner. In the city. Somewhere by the river."
Wanda looked at him across the office, and the smile that had come into her face when she had told him she had never married again stayed there, like a light that had been on all along behind the blinds.
"I would like that," she said. "I have been waiting thirty years for you to ask."
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