the things Hugo told her were true. But she needed to
proceed with caution until she could confirm what she’d
heard with Sam. Proceeding with caution was something
she knew how to do.
The second batch of letters was more dreadful than
the first. An old man railing about the failings of mil-
lennials. A holier-than-thou neighbor complaining about
the burden of a shared driveway. And then—was it even
real?—a letter from a man in love with his bulldog.
It was like playing a game of advice column roulette.
Any of the letters Summer sent could be the one that was
purloined. Most likely suspect? The bulldog love letter.
She copied and pasted a paragraph of the letter’s text into Google and immediately squinted, afraid of what she’d
see. It was nothing weird; just two pages of results about the care and temperament of bulldogs.
She tried the other letters, googling paragraphs of
each one in turn. Again, no matches.
Did that mean anything? If a stolen letter had been
slightly altered, would it come up in Google? She slumped.
She couldn’t risk publishing a stolen letter. She couldn’t stand publishing a boring letter. She refused to publish a letter about a man in love with his dog. But no letter—that would make it easy for Bert to get rid of her.
She checked her email. Nothing from Sam. She re-
freshed it and checked again. Still nothing there.
A third read through of Summer’s letters did not
improve them. She needed new letters. But per Bert’s
instructions, the IT department’s reconfiguration of her
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email meant all new Roxie letters went to Summer. Why had she agreed to that?
She’d agreed to that because her mailbox had become
so overfilled with Roxie letters she couldn’t keep up. She’d agreed because by the time she finished sorting one bunch, a new bunch would arrive. She’d agreed because she was
spending too much time dragging letters in and out of
Sooner, Later, Never, Now.
No. That wasn’t it. Those weren’t the reasons. She’d
agreed because she didn’t have the mental space to say
no. She’d agreed because she was grieving. She closed her
eyes and repeated the sentence to herself: She was grieving.
For the past six months she’d fooled herself into thinking she felt nothing after Aaron’s death. It wasn’t true. She
pinched her eyes tight against the tears she could feel
rising. She could not afford to fall apart now. If she fell apart now—if she let herself feel her grief for Aaron—it
wouldn’t stop there. She opened her eyes, took a deep
breath, blinked away the wetness, glanced at her desktop.
The folders came into focus. Sooner. Later. Never. Now.
That was it. She had folders filled with letters that
weren’t new to her, but they would be new to her readers.
And some of them were good. There was one letter she
still thought about regularly. Where was that one? She
opened all four folders at once and started searching. It
was a letter she debated answering several times, before
deciding the answer was no. It was too short, was her
final reason. Too short to publish. But something about
the letter haunted her. There. She found it. In the Never
folder. Never say never. Never was now.
h h
h h
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Dear Roxie,
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what it was like
before. She doesn’t know how hard it’s been. She
doesn’t know it’s not her fault. She doesn’t know I love
her. I don’t know what to do.
Yours,
Anguished
Dear Anguished,
I don’t know either. I don’t know what it was like before
or how hard it is now. I don’t know who she is or why
she thinks it was her fault. I don’t know who you are,
because I only see your shadow. All that’s clear is your
anguish. But your anguish speaks of love.
Is it possible you haven’t told her because too
much time has passed? If so, we have something in
common. That’s exactly how I felt about your letter. As
you know—and now all my readers know—your letter
did not just arrive. It’s been sitting on my desktop for
a long time, in a folder of letters unfit for publication.
What makes a letter unfit for publication? Some-
times it’s because it feels too intimate. Sometimes it’s
because it feels concocted. How do I decide what’s too
intimate and what’s concocted? It’s not easy.
If you’re a regular reader of this column you know
that I’m a big believer in listening to your gut. Here’s
what you don’t know: I have as much trouble trusting
my gut as you. But I have recently found that if I let my-
self get very quiet, totally quiet, if I allow myself to just sit, I can hear it.
The reason your letter, Dear Anguished, was filed
away, was that I thought it was too short. But it has
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stayed with me, haunting me, for over a year. Haunting
me, much like whatever it is that happened to you is
haunting you.
So may I respectfully suggest that you follow my
lead and seize the day? Make today the day and now
the time that you call or visit the person whom you
believe you’ve harmed. Tell that person what’s in your
heart, be it love, regret, fear, shame, sorrow, anger,
hope, or all it, all the feelings all at once.
Better late than never is a corny proverb, but corny proverbs sometimes hold the truth. And as another
corny proverb says, The truth will set you free.
Be well. Be brave. Be free.
Yours forever, or at least for now,
Roxie
h h
h h
After rereading the letter several times and making minor
changes, Lane attached it to an email to Summer and
copied Bert. She kept the email brief and friendly. No
point making trouble, yet.
Hi, Summer! Thanks for sending on those emails
but I decided to answer this old chestnut, which I
could not get out of my head. I originally thought it
was too short to answer but Short and Sweet feels
right today. Thanks for your help. Cheers!
She pressed Send and snapped her laptop closed.
Through the open screen door, she heard a noise inside
the house. She found her in the kitchen, making tea.
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Her mother glanced up. “You look unwell.”
“I’m fine.” Lane said.
“No need to be snippy. I’m just describing how you
look. Unwell.” Sylvie dipped her tea bag three times
into the steaming water and then wrapped the string
around the spoon and pressed the bag against the side
of the cup. A rivulet of dark liquid ran down the side.
“Tonight is movie night at the center. They invited me
to stay. Maybe I should go back.” She carried her cup to
the table and sat down. “They have pizza first and then
a movie. It’s—�
� She stopped and studied Lane’s face.
“What happened? Did your sister call? Is it your father?
Is he all right?”
Lane opened her mouth to speak and then closed
it again. Where to start? “No one called,” she said. “I
have no idea how Dad is. Why did he go to Shelley’s?
What made you decided to visit me now?” Her mother
blew on her tea and said nothing. Lane sat with the
silence, just as she’d instructed her reader to do. The
next question she asked was one she’d been holding
on to for what seemed like her entire life. “What hap-
pened to us?”
“That’s awfully vague. One question at a time is the
rule and for good reason. More than one at a time is
actually quite irritating.”
Lane thought about how Henry kept questioning her
mother’s rules and then she thought about how Henry
was unable to speak to anyone but her. The thought of
his silence—the thought that it was, in part, because of
her, because of what she did or didn’t do or say—made
her chest feel tight. Having a heavy heart, she’d learned
lately, was a real thing.
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She looked at her mother. “Have you ever felt like
you’ve messed things up so badly you didn’t know if you
could fix it?”
Her mother looked startled. “Yes.” Her eyes readjusted
to a stern stare. “Nothing good comes from picking off
scabs.” She gazed out the kitchen window toward the pond.
“The light is so lovely at this time of day. Everything is lovely here.”
“It is,” Lane said on automatic pilot although she wasn’t
looking at the light and she wasn’t feeling at all lovely. In the silence she felt a quiet rage slowly grow. Rage about
silence. So much silence about so many things. “I need to
understand what happened to our family. I need to know
why we don’t speak to each other. It’s because of Uncle
Albie, isn’t it? Because of Ivy.” She said the next slowly.
“Because of what happened to Ivy.” She expected to feel
the usual wave of regret at having spoken but instead she
felt a shift, a weight lifting.
“You’re a touchy one, Turtle. Always been a touchy
one. So sensitive. We never could predict how you’d take
things. It’s best to let things be. It is what it is.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The startled look was back. “It means things happen.
And not everyone understands why. And time passes and
more things happen. And people say things. And then
they regret the things they said, or they don’t regret them, but they can’t unsay them. And one day, there’s nothing
left to say.” She met Lane’s baffled look with cold eyes.
“Your sister called. They’re coming here. I’m not up to
it, Turtle. Since Albie passed, your father and I—we don’t know what to do.”
“If you tell me what happened, I can help you figure
out what to do.” Seeing her mother’s distress, she felt
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herself soften. “Lots of people think I’m good at that.
Figuring out what to do.”
“Not in real life.” Her mother stood up. “You’ve said it
yourself. Don’t look so bereft, Turtle. It’s not your fault.”
With that, Sylvie Meckler got up and went to bed.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Heaviness. Lane felt it upon wakening. She tried to puzzle out why, before she got out of bed. She didn’t want to
bring the heaviness with her when she woke up Henry.
It took several moments and then came to her. It was
disappointment. She felt let down. She’d made a mistake,
letting herself believe the crusty wall that cocooned her
mother was coming down.
In the two weeks since they’d spoken about her uncle,
their conversations had returned to the safety of small
talk. About the weather. About the condition of the pond.
About what new outing Nathan had proposed that Lane
rejected.
He’d made a lot of proposals. Birding at Felix Neck.
Hiking at Cedar Tree. Cycling to the bike ferry in
Menemsha and then, across the water to Aquinnah. Lane
was as good as anyone she knew at saying no, but Nathan
was better than anyone she’d ever met at being persistent.
It was a gentle persistence and it wore her down until,
finally, she agreed. Today they would go clamming.
“You probably won’t want to,” was how he started,
readying himself for his daily rejection. “Which is fine.
It’s just, I bumped into an old friend of mine yesterday
who’s got a great house on the bay, in Katama. He was
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heading off-island when I saw him. He leaves every August
because he hates the crowds. Ge goes to Maine. He could
make a lot of money if he rented but he doesn’t. He hates
renters. He hates day-trippers. He hates a lot of things.
What he likes is letting friends use his house when he’s
away. As home base to go clamming. You can walk right
into the water from his backyard. I know you’re busy, but
if we time it right, with the tides, we can get a bucket of clams in an hour. What do you say? I’m not suggesting
we make a day of it. It will more like we’re shopping for
dinner. The bay will be our fish store. What do you say?
No? Maybe? Yes?”
His yes sounded so full of hope and kindness that
Lane said yes right back.
h h
He led the way back behind his friend’s house, down
the lawn that sloped to the bay, to a path that wound
through wild grass and pink rose mallow to the water.
The water was cool. The sun beat down. They weren’t
alone. A couple was clamming to their left, though they
seemed to be doing more canoodling than clamming. To
their right was a large group of mixed ages, an extended
family Lane guessed, maybe a reunion. They seemed to
be doing more splashing than digging.
Nathan continued on, toward the far shore where
dunes separated the bay from the ocean. Here were the
solo clammers, heads tipped down toward the water, the
sun turning them into silhouettes. Though they worked
separately, from afar they moved as if in a coordinated
dance. One bending down to scoop their catch, another
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standing up to deposit their catch in a floating basket, a third raking slowly, reach and pull, reach and pull, reach and pull.
Nathan pointed toward the dunes. “The clams are
there.”
They sloshed across the bay—at its deepest it was at
their waist—passing clammers whose bobbing baskets
were all empty, half-empty, nearly full, until they reached an unoccupied swath of water.
“Here,” Nathan said and stopped. “Perfect.” As if to
prove his point, he bent down in the knee-deep water, dug
around with his hand and pulled up a quahog. “Success!”
He took a clam gauge out of his pocket and Lane wat
ched
as the clam slipped through the center. “Too small,” he
said. “Got to let the babies grow.” His face darkened.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Sorry. It’s just, last time I was here
it was with Leo.” He shrugged off the mood. “Good with
the bad, right? Can’t be greedy. Beautiful day. Beautiful
bay.” He gestured toward the seagrass waving in the wind.
“Waves breaking on the other side of the dunes.” He
stopped and they both listened. “All things considered,
I’m a pretty lucky guy.” He shook off his mood. “Okay.
What you have to do is listen while you rake. It’s a tiny
sound when you hit a clam. A little ping. Not everyone
hears it. Some people who don’t hear it, feel it. The rake catching on something. Main thing is, you have to pay
attention. You listen. You feel. You find. You measure.”
Lane lifted her rake and put it back down. She had
paid attention. She had heard the grief in Nathan’s voice.
“What happened to Leo?”
“Nothing happened. Nothing like that. He’s fine.
Me and Leo, not so much.” He winced. “I’m not sure
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I’m ready to talk about it. It’s pretty painful. You can
understand, right? I feel like you could.”
“I can.” Lane started raking and immediately heard
a ping. “I hit something.”
“Let’s take a look.”
She lifted her rake out of the water and saw a giant
gob of seaweed clogging the rake’s teeth. Tangled inside
the middle, she found a clam and carefully removed it.
Nathan watched as she tried to put the clam through the
center of the gauge. “It doesn’t fit.”
“Hurrah!” Nathan called out. “We get to keep it.
You’re a natural! You sure you never did this before?”
Lane heard the echo of the same encouraging tone
he used with Henry when he admired his artwork. He
was so good with Henry. Sometimes when he’d ask
Henry a question, Lane found herself holding her breath,
wondering if this would be the moment Henry would
finally speak. It never was, but Nathan never seemed to
mind.
Aggie’s words came to her out of nowhere: You can
tell the truth about a person by watching how they behave with someone who is different.
Nathan called to her, “I hit the motherlode!” He held
up a pile of seaweed with half a dozen clams nestled within the clump. Lane saw that he didn’t need to measure to