Dear John(80)

I didn’t fully recognize the woman who sat before me, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she went on. “I still remember everything my folks taught me, and I hardly ever have more than a glass a night. But since Jesus himself turned water into wine, I figured that it can’t be much of a sin.”

I smiled at her logic, recognizing how unfair it was to cling to the time-capsule version I held of her. “I wasn’t asking.”

“I know,” she said. “But you were wondering.”

For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the low hum of the refrigerator. “I’m sorry about your dad,” she said, tracing a crack in the tabletop. “I really am. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about him in the past few years.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Savannah began rotating her glass again, seemingly lost in the swirl of liquid. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure I did, but as I leaned back in my chair, the words came surprisingly easily. I told her about my dad’s first heart attack, and the second, and the visits we’d shared in the past couple of years. I told her about our growing friendship, and the comfort I felt with him, the walks that he began taking and then eventually gave up. I recounted my final days with him and the agony of committing him to an extended care facility. When I described the funeral and the photograph I found in the envelope, she reached for my hand.

“I’m glad he saved it for you,” she said, “but I’m not surprised.”

“I was,” I said, and she laughed. It was a reassuring sound.

She squeezed my hand. “I wish I’d have known. I would have liked to go to the funeral.”

“It wasn’t much.”

“It didn’t have to be. He was your dad, and that’s all that matters.” She hesitated before releasing my hand and took another sip of wine.

“Are you ready to eat?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, flushing at the memory of her earlier comment.

She leaned forward with a grin. “How about I heat you up a plate of stew and we’ll see what happens.”

“Is it any good?” I asked. “I mean . . . when I knew you before, you never mentioned that you knew how to cook.”

“It’s our special family recipe,” she said, pretending to be offended. “But I’ve got to be honest—my mom made it. She brought it over yesterday.”

“The truth comes out,” I said.

“That’s the funny thing about the truth,” she said. “It usually does.” She rose and opened the refrigerator, bending over as she scanned the shelves. I found myself wondering about the ring on her finger and where her husband was as she pulled out the Tupperware. She scooped some of the stew into a bowl and placed it in the microwave.

“Do you want anything else with that? How about some bread and butter?”

“That would be great,” I agreed.

A few minutes later, the meal was spread before me, and the aroma reminded me for the first time of how hungry I actually was. Surprising me, Savannah took her place again, holding her glass of wine.

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “Actually, I haven’t been eating much lately.” She took a sip as I took my first bite and I let her comment pass.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s delicious.”

She smiled. “Mom’s a good cook. You’d think I would have learned more about cooking, but I didn’t. I was always too busy. Too much studying when I was young, and then lately, too much remodeling.” She motioned toward the living room. “It’s an old house. I know it doesn’t look like it, but we’ve done a lot of work in the past couple of years.”

“It looks great.”

“You’re just being polite, but I appreciate it,” she replied. “You should have seen the place when I moved in. It was kind of like the barn, you know? We needed a new roof, but it’s funny—no one ever thinks of roofs when they’re imagining what to remodel. It’s one of those things that everyone expects a house to have but never thinks might one day need replacing. Almost everything we’ve done falls into that category. Heat pumps, thermal windows, fixing the termite damage . . . there were a lot of long days.” She wore a dreamy expression on her face. “We did most of the work ourselves. Like with the kitchen here. I know we need new cabinets and flooring, but when we moved in, there were puddles in the living room and bedrooms every time it rained. What were we supposed to do? We had to prioritize, and one of the first things we did was to tear all the old shingles from the roof. It must have been a hundred degrees and I’m up there with a shovel, scraping shingles off, getting blisters. But . . . it just felt right, you know? Two young people starting out in the world, working together and repairing their home? There was such a sense of . . . togetherness about it. It was the same thing when we did the floor in the living room. It must have taken a couple of weeks to sand it down and get it level again. We stained it and added a layer of varnish, and when we finally walked across it, it felt like we’d laid the foundation for the rest of our lives.”