The Feed Store Letters

The handwriting got me before the name did. That heavy forward slant, the way he crossed his T's like he was annoyed at them. I stood on the studio steps with the envelope in both hands and knew it was Cyrus Martino before I read a single word, and my first thought wasn't Cyrus, it was 1989, it was the foundry, it was that afternoon.

I'm fifty-three, and I've been married to Johan for twenty-three years, and nothing about this letter made me unhappy with my life. It's just that there was a thing that happened when I was twenty-four, one afternoon in the whole of it, and I had carried it around for thirty years like a stone in a coat pocket. You forget it's there until you put the coat on again.

The foundry summer. I was fresh out of the university program, apprenticing under a sculptor named Harlan Boyd who paid in experience and bad coffee. Cyrus was a year older than me, twenty-five, working the same studio, and he was doing stained glass on the side, which seemed exotic to me then. He was careful about everything. He measured twice, he swept his own corner, he wiped his hands on his canvas apron before he touched anything that mattered.

The day I'm talking about was in July, and the studio was an oven. There was one window fan that barely moved the air around, it just pushed the heat into new shapes. We had a bottle of water between us, warm on one side where it sat near the furnace, cold at the bottom if you drank fast. I remember that. I remember the coal dust smell and the way sweat made a line down his spine through his shirt.

And I remember that we were both reaching into the same crate of clay tools, and our hands met, and instead of pulling back like normal people, we just stopped. He looked at me. I looked at him. His mouth opened like he was going to say something, and I leaned in maybe two inches, and he leaned in maybe one, and then he wiped his hands on his apron, which was the most Cyrus thing he could possibly have done, and said it was getting late, and Harlan would want the molds turned.

That was it. Twenty-nine years ago. We finished the summer polite as church mice, and then he went off to some glass program in Kansas City, and I moved here to Three Forks and met Johan, and life went on and was good. But I never once forgot that inch.

So I sat down on the steps and opened the envelope.

The letter was four pages, and it started, Katelyn, you'll probably throw this at the wall, and my wife says I have to send it before we're both old and dead. Winnie found me standing in front of my workbench last month not making anything, just staring, and when she dug it out of me she said, well, for heaven's sake, write to her then, I'm not going to spend the next twenty years watching you hum about it.

He wrote that he'd thought about me for twenty-nine years. Not in a creepy way, he specified, and I laughed out loud on the steps at that, at a fifty-four-year-old stained-glass man worrying about seeming creepy in a letter. He wrote that he'd been too careful that day, that careful was the whole problem of his life, and that he'd often wondered what would have happened if we hadn't both chickened out. Then he asked, plainly, whether I ever wondered too. He said I didn't have to answer. He said the feed store studio on Main Street had a door that stuck in summer, and if I ever wanted to talk about it in person instead of on paper, the door would stick for me anytime.

I carried the letter around the yard for a while. Then I went in and told Johan, because I tell Johan everything, and he'd known about Cyrus for years anyway. He'd found a sketch of the foundry in one of my old portfolios when we were first married and I'd explained the whole inch to him over a bottle of wine. He read Cyrus's letter twice and handed it back.

"Write him back," he said. "Guy waited twenty-nine years. Don't make him wait through the weekend too."

So I wrote back that night at the kitchen table while Johan watched some game show and yelled at the television. I told Cyrus that yes, I wondered. I told him I still remembered the coal dust smell, and the way he wiped his hands on his apron before reaching for my hand that day, like my hand was something that mattered, something you didn't touch with furnace grit on you. I told him the fan never worked and we drank that water warm and I would have kissed him if he'd given me a third inch instead of two. I told him about the sketch, that I'd drawn the foundry a dozen times over the years and always left one corner of it unfinished, and I hadn't understood until that night why I always left that corner, but it was the corner where we'd stood.

I asked him what he would have said, that day, if he'd been braver. I sealed the envelope and left it for the morning pickup and slept fine, which surprised me.

His second letter came three days later, and it was longer, and his handwriting had loosened up some, like the first letter had been him holding his breath.

He wrote about the feed store studio. He rents the space above it, up a wooden staircase that creaks in four places, and the whole floor smells of grain and leather that came up through the boards decades ago and never left. He wrote about the door, how it swells in summer and you have to lift the handle and push with your hip, and how he'd painted a small blue heron on the lower panel because his first year there a heron had stood in the creek behind the building every morning for a week like it was waiting for him. He wrote about the light in the afternoons, how the dusty old windows turn it honey-colored, and how he does his best cutting work between two and five because of it.

And then he answered my question. He said if he'd been braver, he would have said, Katelyn, I've been trying to figure out how to kiss you for six weeks and I can't come up with anything clever, so I'm just going to ask. And then he would have asked. He wrote that what got him, what he'd replayed all those years, wasn't even our hands touching, it was that I'd leaned in first, two inches, and that he'd spent a long time forgiving himself for letting that go unanswered.

He asked me to match him. He wanted my version, the