The Box of Letters

The box was made of dark wood and had once held expensive tea. Sam carried it out of the office on a Sunday night in April and put it on Mr. Grant's table at exactly three o'clock.

"These are yours," Sam said. "I've kept them for three years. I think it's time they went home."

Mr. Grant looked at the box for a long moment. Then he lifted the lid. Inside, standing in neat rows like cards in a library, were hundreds of envelopes. Every one of them said Eleanor on the front. The oldest ones, at the back, were a little yellow.

"I never knew what you did with them," Mr. Grant said quietly. "I thought perhaps you threw them away."

"I don't throw away things that people leave on purpose," said Sam, and went back to the kitchen before anybody could see his face.

Mr. Grant didn't write a letter that night. Instead, he took out the first envelope, from the very back of the box, and asked Maya to read it to him. His eyes were not good enough anymore for his own old handwriting.

Maya sat down and opened it carefully.

My dear Eleanor, it began. It is three o'clock, and for the first time in twenty years you are not coming through that door. Everybody tells me it gets easier. I do not believe them. I am writing because I do not know what else to do with the hour. The tea is too hot and the chair across from me is empty.

Maya read slowly. Some letters were short, just a few lines about the weather or the price of bread. Others filled two pages. Many of them described small things: a new nurse at the café, a snowstorm, a book he had finished, a bird that had built a nest on his windowsill.