The Last Letter From Summer

You have to understand, I don't get real mail. Ever. The mailbox at the end of my drive gets bills, a seed catalog, and once a year something from the county about water rights. So when I saw a legal-sized envelope sitting in there on a Tuesday morning in late August, with no return address and my name written in pen, in handwriting I hadn't seen in twenty years, I just about dropped my coffee.

Lucas.

Fifty-five years old now, and my hands still shook a little holding his letter. Kimberly, you're fifty-four years old, I told myself. You run four hundred head. You have buried two dogs and a marriage proposal from Drew Whitcomb that you politely declined in 2011. Get a grip.

I didn't get a grip. I stood right there at the mailbox, flies buzzing around my ears, and opened it.

One line inside. That's all.

*You still have my old saddle blanket?*

Well. What do you do with that? I laughed out loud, alone, on my own driveway, as a mad person would. The audacity of it! Twenty years of nothing, not a Christmas card, not a phone call when my father passed, and this man opens with a question about a saddle blanket like we'd spoken last week.

And yes. Of course I still had it. It was folded in the cedar chest at the foot of my bed, and that's nobody's business but mine.

* * *

I want to tell you I thought about it for days. I did not. I thought about it for about four hours, through fence-mending and one very confused heifer, and then that evening I sat down at the kitchen table with the dog under my feet and wrote back.

Dear Lucas, I wrote. (Dear? After twenty years? But what else do you write?)

*Yes, I have your old saddle blanket. It's in a cedar chest where I keep things I don't look at. You always did have a talent for the dramatic, even on paper. A legal-sized envelope, Lucas? No return address? Were you worried the FBI would intercept it, or did you just want me to spend the whole morning guessing?*

*The answer to your question is yes and also none of your business. Why do you ask?*

*Kimberly*

*P.S. It's 2023. I'm fifty-four. In case you were going to pretend this is 2003 and we're both still in our thirties at the Crook County fair, eating kettle corn and pretending we aren't going to kiss behind the livestock barn. We did, in case you forgot. Twice.*

Maybe the P.S. Was too much. Maybe it wasn't enough. I read it over four times, addressed it, and drove it into town the next morning because if I left it on the counter I'd chicken out, and I refuse, at my age, to chicken out of things.

* * *

Eleven days. Eleven days I waited, and I will deny to anyone that I counted. Then came another legal-sized envelope, and this one had more than one line, this one had three full pages, front and back, in that same slanted handwriting.

He teased me right back about the blanket, of course. Wouldn't tell me why he asked, just like I wouldn't tell him why I kept it. Two stubborn people, twenty years later, both guarding the same little secret. But then the second page turned and I stopped being amused and started being something else.

*Here is a thing I never told you,* he wrote. *The summer we met, when you'd come out to the fairgrounds in the evenings to exercise that palomino of yours, I used to time my walks past the arena. Do you remember? You'd be up in the saddle with the sun going down behind you, and your hands on the reins, and the light would come through your fingers like you were holding it. I'd stand by the rail and pretend I was there for the horses. I was never there for the horses, Kimberly. You know that now, I hope.*

*I've drawn a lot of buildings since then. Big ones. Glass and steel and money. Not one of them has ever looked as good to me as you did at 7:40 in the evening, dusty, laughing at something your horse did, completely unaware of me at the rail.*

I read that page three times. Then I put it down on the counter, walked outside, stood in the middle of my own pasture for a while, and came back in and read it again.

There's a thing that happens in your chest at fifty-four that I didn't expect. A heat, a bloom of it, right behind the breastbone, same as when you're thirty-four. I'd have sworn it was retired. Apparently not. Apparently some man across the state can describe your hands in the late sun and your whole body just lights up like a barn at Christmas. Who knew?

My dog, Juniper, knew. She looked at me like, well, finally.

* * *

So I wrote back. Second real letter, and by now I wasn't pretending to be casual, and neither was he.

*Lucas. You can't say things like that in a letter to a woman who lives alone with a dog and four hundred cows. What do you expect me to do with a paragraph like that, ride around the property all day with my head in the clouds? Because that's what happened. Drew's boy found me stopped in the middle of the county road on the four-wheeler, just sitting there. Very dignified. Thanks a lot.*

*Here's my morning, since you asked and since you started this. I found your first letter at 7:15 on a Tuesday. The sage was strong that day, the way it gets when the nights turn cool early, and the grass is drying gold on the hills. Juniper barked her head off at the mailbox like the mailman was a stranger, which he is not, he's Chuck, she's known him for nine years, she's just dramatic. She gets that from somebody. I'm not naming names.*

*And since we're apparently confessing things after two decades, here's one for you. Do you remember the afternoon I fell off the fence at your brother's place? The rail broke, the one I'd been warned about three times, and I went over backward, and you caught me. Do you remember it? Because I remember it every summer when the fence line needs fixing, which is a problem, since I fix fence for a living.*

*Tell me you at least remember that. It would be embarrassing to be the only one.*

*K.*

He remembered. Of course he remembered, and his letter about it made me put a hand flat on the table like a woman in a movie, I'm not even kidding.

*I remember the exact sound the rail made. I remember turning around because I heard you laugh first, that laugh you do when you know you're about to eat dirt. And I remember the weight of you when you landed against me. Your shoulder against my chest. Your hair in my face, and it smelled like, well, I'll keep some things to myself. I remember your boots swinging and one of them hitting my shin, and I remember that I did not put you down right away, and you did not ask me to. We stood there maybe five full seconds longer than a rescue requires. I have done math about those five seconds for twenty years, Kimberly.*

*So yes. I remember. And here is my question, the real one, the one the saddle blanket was only the door to. Do you ever think about that summer? Not politely. Not at Christmas with a glass of wine. I mean really think about it, the way I do, which is too often and at inconvenient times. Because I'm fifty-five years old and I've built everything I set out to build, and the only thing I got wrong is that I left.*

I sat with that letter until the light went out of the kitchen. Juniper had to remind me, twice, that dogs also eat dinner.

The only thing I got wrong is that I left. Well, Lucas. That's quite a sentence to mail to a woman at the end of a dirt road.

I got out fresh paper. Fair's in three weeks, I started to