The Letter in the Nightstand Drawer

For twelve years, an envelope had remained inside my bedside drawer, untouched and unopened.

It rested beneath a Bible, a tube of hand lotion, my reading glasses, and a small pile of birthday cards from my grandchildren. It was an ordinary white envelope, sealed shut, with a single word written across the front in my husband’s slanted handwriting.

Margaret.

Some evenings, I would take it out and hold it in my hands. I would turn it over and gently run my thumb along the sealed flap.

Then I would place it back where I had found it.

Robert gave it to me three days before he passed away. He was lying in a hospital bed at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, with tubes in his arms and skin that had turned pale as old paper. He placed the envelope in my palm and folded my fingers around it.

“Promise me something, Maggie.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t open this unless something happens that you can’t explain.”

“What sort of thing?”

He studied my face for a long moment. His eyes had filled with tears.

“You’ll know,” he told me.

I gave him my promise.

For twelve years, nothing happened that I couldn’t explain. My husband died. My children grew older. My grandchildren started having children of their own. The maple tree in the backyard grew taller, my knees grew weaker, and the house became increasingly quiet.

Then, when I was eighty years old, my body began changing in a way I couldn’t make sense of.

And at last, I understood what Robert had meant.

My name is Margaret Whitmore, and I’m eighty years old.

I raised three children, welcomed seven grandchildren, and watched four great-grandchildren become part of our family. Robert Whitmore was my husband for fifty years. For thirty-eight of those years, he sold life insurance for Charter Oak Mutual in Hartford. He wore the same brown suit to work for ten years. He clipped coupons and drove a Buick until the odometer reached two hundred and eleven thousand miles.

He was the most ordinary and reliable man I had ever known.

At least, that was what I believed.

After everything I had experienced in my life, I thought there was very little left that could catch me by surprise.

I was mistaken.

It began six months earlier, in the spring.

At first, I noticed that my waist seemed a little larger than normal. I became aware of it while getting dressed for church. My navy-blue skirt felt tighter around the button.

I assumed I had gained some ordinary weight. I had been eating too many lemon cookies that my neighbor, Dottie, brought over every Thursday. At my age, everything seemed to settle somewhere.

Then my favorite gray trousers no longer fit.

By June, I could barely fasten the zipper on any pair of pants I owned. I started wearing loose cotton dresses, the sort without a defined waist. I convinced myself it was simply because the weather had grown hot.

By August, my stomach had become round, firm, and swollen, making me look like a woman who was five months pregnant. Whenever I bent down to tie my shoes, I became breathless. Sitting in Robert’s old recliner felt like balancing a bag of groceries across my lap.

I tried not to dwell on it.

When you reach eighty, you learn that searching for problems in your body will almost always lead you to find something. So I stopped paying attention. I wore my loose dresses, ate smaller portions, and told myself the swelling would disappear eventually.

On the first Sunday in September, my family came over for dinner.

They visited once a month. It was the only thing I had asked them to continue doing since Robert died.

My oldest son, Thomas, arrived with his wife, Sarah, and their two youngest grandchildren. Thomas was sixty-one and worked as an accountant, just as I had always expected he would. Even as a little boy, he arranged his crayons according to color and counted them before going to bed.

My daughter, Claire, joined us by video from Phoenix, where she had lived for twenty years. The grandchildren held the iPad over the pot roast so she could see what we were having.

Daniel couldn’t come. He was my youngest child, fifty-six years old, and a high school history teacher in Glastonbury. That day, he was supervising some kind of school field trip.

I had prepared pot roast, mashed potatoes, and green beans with almonds. It was the same Sunday dinner I had been making since 1970.

Halfway through the meal, Thomas put down his fork.

“Mom, I want to discuss the house again.”

I let out a sigh. “Thomas, not tonight.”

“It’s always not tonight. We have to discuss it eventually.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “You’re eighty years old. The stairs are steep, the furnace is thirty years old, and the property taxes have increased again. They were eight thousand four hundred dollars this year.”

“I know how much the property taxes are. I pay them.”

“You pay them using Dad’s pension and your Social Security, and there’s hardly anything left at the end of the month. I’ve looked at the statements.”

He had, of course. Thomas had held power of attorney over my finances ever since I developed pneumonia three years earlier. I had signed the paperwork in a lawyer’s office in West Hartford when I was too exhausted to argue. It was supposed to be for emergencies only. Thomas had never been particularly good at accepting the word only.

“I spoke to a place in Avon,” he continued. “Brookside Senior Living. It’s lovely, Mom. They have a library and a garden. You could begin with independent living and move to assisted living if you ever needed more help. The house would sell for at least four hundred and ten thousand dollars. Probably more. That would pay for Brookside for years.”

“I’m not moving to Avon.”

“Mom—”

“Your father and I raised you in this house. He planted that maple tree. I intend to die in this house, Thomas. Afterward, you can sell it and use the money to buy yourself a boat.”

The grandchildren fell silent.

Thomas’s face reddened. He picked up his fork and stabbed one of the green beans on his plate.

That was when Sarah spoke.

Sarah was Thomas’s wife. She worked as a dental hygienist, was soft-spoken, and had been part of our family for thirty-four years. She had never once called me anything other than Mom. She was the kind of person who noticed when someone lost weight, began limping, or had been crying.

Now, she was watching my stomach.

“Mom, may I ask you something?”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

She paused before speaking gently.

“Have you talked to your doctor about the swelling?”

Every face at the table turned toward me.

I gave a light laugh and patted my dress. “Sarah, I’m eighty years old. My body doesn’t function the way it once did.”

But she didn’t smile.

“Margaret,” she said. She never called me by my first name. “I really think you should get it checked. Please.”

Thomas looked at my stomach too. This time, he seemed to be seeing it properly for the first time all evening.

“Mom,” he said slowly, “how long has it been like that?”

“For a little while.”

“What do you mean by a little while?”

“Since spring, I suppose.”

He stared at me in disbelief.

“Since spring? Mom, that’s six months!”

“Don’t raise your voice at me in my own dining room.”

“I’m not raising my voice. I’m—” He placed both hands flat on the table. “You need to see a doctor. This week.”

“I’ll call Dr. Abrams’s office tomorrow,” I told him.

“Dr. Abrams retired three years ago, Mom.”

I had forgotten.

Sarah reached across the table and gently squeezed my hand.

“I can make the appointment for you,” she offered. “If you’d like.”

I promised her I would arrange it myself.

I never did.