At six-thirty on Sunday evening I’m standing at the workbench trying to remember why I came out to the workshop.

I was up all Saturday night cutting the gear. I got maybe three hours of sleep this morning, and then I went back out to the Juneberry anyway and put in another half day on the frame, because I didn’t know what else to do with myself after the booth. Now my hands keep picking things up and putting them down. A chisel. A tape measure. A pencil I sharpened twice already.

I wrote you a letter.

No, you didn’t.

The way she said it. Not angry, even. Certain. As if she had checked.

Lucia is sitting on the steps with a bowl of cereal, which she considers dinner on Sundays. She’s been watching me for ten minutes without saying anything, and that’s a record for her.

“You want to talk about it?” she finally asks.

“No.”

“You want me to guess?”

“No.”

“You tried to kiss Hattie Albrecht and she shut you down.”

I put the pencil down. Lucia shoves a spoonful of cereal in her mouth so she doesn’t have to hide her smile.

“How,” I say.

“You’re sharpening a pencil that’s already sharp. You did that for a month in eleventh grade after she beat you at the science fair.”

Before I can think of something to say back, headlights sweep across the open workshop door. A car comes up the gravel drive too fast and stops too hard. The engine cuts off. A door slams.

Lucia sets the bowl down on the step beside her. “I’m going to go inside,” she says, “and be very busy.”

Hattie stops in the doorway.

She’s covered in dust. There’s a gray streak down one side of her face and cobwebs in her hair, and her eyes are red and swollen in a way that tells me she has been crying hard, and recently, and probably more than once. She’s holding something against her chest with both hands, the way you’d hold a baby bird.

“Hattie. What happened? Are you okay?”

She doesn’t answer. She walks straight to the workbench and sets the thing down on it, carefully, in the one clear spot between my drawings and a coffee can full of screws.

It’s an envelope. Old and yellowed. My handwriting on the front. My handwriting from when I was nineteen, all tall capitals, trying to look steadier than I was.

HATTIE.

The workshop goes very quiet. I can hear the fluorescent light buzzing overhead and the crickets in the field and my own pulse in my ears.

“Where,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Where did you find that?”

“Behind the Roman Holiday cans. On the top shelf in the booth.” She pushes the envelope an inch toward me with one finger. “Look at the corner.”

There’s a square of notepaper clipped to it. Tall slanted handwriting. I’ve seen that handwriting on a hundred snack bar menus.

For Hattie. When she comes home.

I read it three times before the meaning goes in.

The empty can. The five weeks. Eleven years of believing Hattie had climbed those stairs, found the letter, read every word I wrote with my hands shaking, and then decided her answer was silence.

She never climbed the stairs. Rosemary did.

I sit down on the stool. I have to.

“It’s still sealed,” Hattie says. “I didn’t open it. I couldn’t do it alone in that booth. I drove here and I almost turned around four times.” She wraps her arms around herself. “I need to read it. And I need you to stay while I do. You don’t have to say anything. Just don’t leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her, and this time she hears it.

She opens it standing up.

The flap has been stuck down so long that the glue has turned to dust, and it comes open with almost no sound. She takes out the three yellow pages, still folded in thirds, and smooths them flat on the workbench with both palms. Then she picks them up again and turns so the light is behind her, and she reads.

I don’t watch her face. I can’t. I look at my own hands instead, and at the scar on my thumb from a chisel two winters ago, and I listen to the pages turn.

I remember most of it. You don’t forget a thing like that. I remember writing that Dad was on the kitchen floor at eleven o’clock and in an ambulance by eleven-twenty, and that Mom was trying to pack a bag with one hand and hold on to Lucia with the other. I remember writing that I didn’t know how long we’d be gone, or if Dad would walk, or talk, or come home at all.

And I remember the part in the middle, because it was the hardest part, and I rewrote it twice.

She reads that part out loud. I don’t think she means to.

“‘I know you. If I call, you’ll hear something in my voice, and you’ll stay. You’ll unpack your bag and you’ll sit with me in a hospital waiting room for months and tell me it’s what you wanted. And someday you’ll look up and realize Chicago went on without you. I can’t be the reason for that. Please go. Go and see every one of those theaters on your list. I’ll be okay, I promise, and when things are better I’ll come find you, if you still want me to.’”

She stops. The pages shake a little in her hands.

“‘If you want me to call,’” she reads, quieter, “‘leave a note in the HOLD can. I’ll check the minute I’m home. Even if it takes a long time. Even if it’s just one word.’”

She lowers the letter.

I finally look up, and she’s crying without making a sound. The tears just come, one after another, and she doesn’t wipe them.

“I’d have left one,” she says. “Theo. I’d have left a hundred.”

“I know.”

“You don’t. You don’t know. I waited at that ticket booth until eight in the morning with two coffees. I called you until your voicemail was full. I drove to your house and it was dark.” Her voice cracks. “And then I drove to Chicago by myself, and I spent eleven years thinking you just didn’t want to say goodbye to me. That I wasn’t worth one phone call.”

“Hattie.”

“Eleven years.”

“I came back for that can,” I say. “Five weeks later. First place I went. Before I even went home.” The stool creaks as I lean forward with my elbows on my knees. “It was empty. I thought that meant you’d read it, and you took it with you. I thought that was my answer.”

She stares at me.

“I thought you chose not to write back,” I say. “Every day for eleven years, that’s what I thought. When you sat on the hood of your car Friday morning with three fingers in the air, I thought you were being kind. I thought you didn’t want to have to say it to my face.”

Hattie makes a sound that is half a laugh and half something breaking.

“Three fingers,” she says. “Oh my God. We’re both idiots.”

“Mostly me.”

“No. Not mostly you.” She looks down at the note clipped to the corner of the envelope. “Her.”

For a while, nobody says anything.

Hattie folds the letter along its old creases, very carefully, and puts it back in the envelope. She doesn’t take the note off the corner. I don’t think she can.

I get up and fill the kettle at the workshop sink, because my mother raised me to put a kettle on when something terrible happens, and also because I need to do something with my hands before they start shaking. The kettle is ancient and loud. We both watch it like it’s going to tell us what to do next.

The back door of the house opens. Dad stands in the light with his cane, in his bathrobe, and looks across the yard at the two of us. He can’t see much in the dark. He can see enough.

“Evening, Hattie,” he calls.

Hattie wipes her face fast with both sleeves. “Hi, Mr. Quintana.”

“Still making terrible lemonade?”

A laugh comes out of her, wet and surprised. “Worse than ever.”

“Good. Some things shouldn’t change.” He nods, like that settles something, and lifts the cane an inch, and goes back inside. The door clicks shut. I hear Lucia’s voice in the kitchen, very low and very urgent, and Dad’s voice answering, and then nothing.

“He remembers the lemonade,” Hattie says.

“He remembers everything. It just takes him a little longer to get there.”

The kettle starts to scream. I make two mugs of tea neither of us wants, and I bring one to her, and our fingers touch on the handle, and this time neither of us pulls away fast.

We sit on the workshop floor, because the stools are too far apart and neither of us wants to suggest moving them closer. She’s got her back against the leg of the workbench and the letter in her lap. I’m against the wall, a few feet away. Outside it’s gone full dark. Lucia has turned off the kitchen light, a clear signal that she is not watching through the window, which means she definitely is.

“Why would she do that?” Hattie asks. “She had to have found it that first week. She was up in that booth every single day. She must have seen my name and just taken it.”

“She didn’t open it.”

“No. She didn’t open it. She didn’t mail it, either. She didn’t tell me. She didn’t tell you.” Hattie turns the envelope over and over in her fingers. “She called me every single Sunday for eleven years. And every single Sunday she asked when I was coming home.”

For Hattie. When she comes home.

I think about March. The folding chair at the bottom of the scaffolding. The thermos of cocoa. The way Rosemary talked about Hattie for hours and never once asked me why I left. I thought she was being polite. I thought she was being gentle with me.

I don’t think that anymore.

“I think she knew what was in it,” I say slowly. “Maybe not the words. But she knew my dad was in the hospital. The whole town knew by that afternoon. She knew what I’d say. And she knew you.”

Hattie closes her eyes.

“If she gave it to you in September,” I say, “what would you have done?”

She’s quiet for a long time.

“I’d have come home,” she says. “That day. I’d have dropped out and driven straight to Grand Rapids.”

“Yeah.”

“And she’d just sent me off to Chicago herself. She sewed my name into my jacket. She bought me a mini fridge.” Hattie presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. “She did exactly what you did. She decided for me.”

It lands in my chest like a stone dropped in a well. You keep waiting for the sound of it hitting bottom, and it takes a long time.

“She was waiting for you to come home on your own,” I say. “Not for me. Not for a letter. For you.”

“And I never did.”

“You did,” I say. “You’re here.”

She lowers her hands and looks at me across the dark workshop, and for once there’s nothing between us. No rules. No three fingers. Just a woman with dust in her hair and her grandmother’s handwriting in her lap.

“Can I ask you something?” she says. “And you’ll tell me the truth.”

“I always tell you the truth.”

“I know. That’s the problem.” She almost smiles. “If you’d called me that morning. If you’d told me about your dad, and asked me to come.”

“You would have come.”

“I would have stayed,” Hattie says. “Theo. I would have stayed.”

“I know.” My throat hurts. I say it anyway, because she asked for the truth, and because I have been carrying it for eleven years and I’m tired. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.”