The envelope was cream-colored and heavier than it looked.
The woman at the gate desk held it out to me with both hands, the way you’d hand someone a gift. She was young, with a neat bun and a name tag that said JESSICA.
“Someone arranged for this to be delivered to you, Mrs. Wilson,” she said. “Before you board.”
“Who?”
“I’m afraid I only have instructions to give it to you.” She smiled. “And to tell you one thing.”
“What thing?”
She glanced down at a sticky note beside her keyboard and read it out carefully, like she didn’t want to get the words wrong.
“There’s something you still don’t know about this trip.”
I stood there with my carry-on bag strapped across my chest and my brand-new passport in my hand. Behind me, a toddler was crying. Somebody’s coffee smelled burnt.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was an old letter, folded in thirds. The paper had gone soft and yellow at the edges.
I recognized the handwriting before I read a single word.
The little loops on the L’s. The way the T’s were crossed too far to the right, like the pen was in a hurry to get somewhere.
My husband’s handwriting.
My husband, who had been dead for thirty-two years.
To understand why my knees almost gave out at Gate B14, you have to know a little about me. And about Richard.
So let me go back about four months, to a Friday afternoon in June, and a sheet cake.
I was sixty-eight when I finally retired after almost forty years of teaching elementary school.
Thirty-nine years, to be exact. Most of them in third grade at Lincoln Elementary in Dayton, Ohio. Room 12, at the end of the hall by the water fountain that never worked right.
I’d kept my maiden name, Wilson, when Richard and I got married. That was a bit of a scandal back then. His mother asked me at the wedding if I was “one of those women’s libbers.” I told her I just liked my name. After nearly forty years of teaching, it didn’t matter anymore anyway. Everyone in that part of Dayton simply knew me as Mrs. Wilson. Grown men with beards stopped me at the grocery store to say, “Mrs. Wilson! You taught me cursive!”
On my last day, the kids made me a banner out of construction paper. WE WILL MISS YOU MRS WILSON. The S in MISS was backwards. I didn’t fix it.
The other teachers threw me a little party in the teachers’ lounge. There was punch in a plastic bowl and a card everybody had signed. The principal, a nice young man named Mr. Okafor, gave a speech that made me cry into a paper napkin.
Then my daughter Emma walked in carrying a sheet cake.
It had blue frosting roses around the edges, and in the middle, in big swirly letters, it said:
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR FREEDOM!
“Freedom?” I laughed. “I still have thirty years of laundry waiting for me.”
“Then leave it, Mom,” Emma said. She set the cake down and kissed my cheek. “Do something you’ve always wanted.”
Everyone in the lounge said “Aww.”
I smiled and cut the cake and handed out pieces on paper plates.
But on the drive home, with the banner rolled up on the passenger seat, I kept thinking about what she’d said.
Do something you’ve always wanted.
And the problem was, I couldn’t think of anything.
I’d spent so long taking care of everyone else that I’d forgotten what I wanted.
My husband Richard died of a heart attack thirty-two years ago.
It happened on a Tuesday in March. He was in the driveway, scraping ice off the windshield of his Buick so he could drive to the airport for another work trip. I was inside packing Daniel’s lunch. I heard the scraper hit the ground.
I don’t remember much after that. I remember the ambulance lights on the snow. I remember Emma, who was twelve, standing in the doorway in her nightgown, holding her little brother’s hand. Daniel was nine. He kept asking, “Is Daddy going to the hospital? Is he going to be okay?”
He wasn’t.
He was thirty-eight years old.
Richard was my first love. We met in college, at a dance I didn’t want to go to. He stepped on my foot twice and apologized so many times that I finally laughed and said, “If you apologize one more time, I’m leaving.” He said, “Then I’ll just step on your foot again so you’ll stay.” We were married two years later.
After he died, there was a small life insurance policy, and the house, and me. That was it.
So I worked. I taught all day, and then I tutored kids after school, and in the summers I worked at a day camp and graded summer school papers at the kitchen table until midnight.
One night, Emma came downstairs at eleven o’clock and found me asleep with my cheek on a stack of spelling tests.
“Mom,” she said. “Why do you work so much?”
I sat up and wiped my face. There was a red ink smudge on my cheek. She laughed at it, but she didn’t look happy.
“Because I want you and Daniel to have everything you need, sweetheart.”
“And what about you?”
“I have you two,” I said. “That’s enough.”
She looked at me for a long time, the way only a twelve-year-old girl can look at you when she knows you’re not telling the whole truth.
Then she went back to bed.
I kept notebooks. I always had. Spiral ones from the drugstore, the kind with the cardboard covers that get soft at the corners. I wrote down things the kids said, funny things my students did, recipes, dreams I had at night, lists of places I wanted to go someday.
A few months after Richard died, I started writing letters to him in those notebooks.
Dear Richard, Daniel lost his first tooth at school today. He was so proud. He kept it in a little envelope and showed it to the mailman.
Dear Richard, the furnace broke. I called your brother. He said he’d come look at it, and then he didn’t come. I miss you most when things break.
Dear Richard, Emma got her driver’s license. She backed into the mailbox. I didn’t tell her you did the same thing when you were sixteen. I’m saving that for when she needs it.
One evening, Emma found me at the kitchen table writing.
“Who are you writing to, Mom?”
“Your dad, sweetheart.”
She frowned. “But he can’t read them.”
“I know,” I said. “But writing to him makes me feel like he’s still here.”
She didn’t say anything. She just put her hand on my shoulder for a second, and then she poured herself some milk and went upstairs.
I wrote to Richard for thirty-two years. I filled twenty-six notebooks. They’re in a cardboard box in my bedroom closet, labeled in black marker. RICHARD.
I never dated again. People tried to set me up. A widowed dentist from church. A gym teacher from another school. I went to dinner with the dentist once. He talked about his boat for an hour and a half. I went home and wrote Richard a very funny letter about it.
For thirty-two years, I believed I’d had a perfect love. Even if it had ended too soon.
I believed it the way you believe the sun will come up.
Three months after I retired, my doctor told me I had terminal cancer.
I’d been tired for a while. I thought it was just retirement. I thought my body was finally catching up on forty years of sleep. Then I started losing weight without trying, and there was a pain under my ribs that wouldn’t go away, and Emma made me go to the doctor.
Then there were scans. Then more scans. Then a biopsy.
Then a small room with a box of tissues on the table, which is how you know.
Dr. Patel was a kind man in his fifties with reading glasses on a cord around his neck. He’d been my doctor for fifteen years. He took his glasses off when I sat down.
“Mrs. Wilson,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
He told me what it was and where it had spread. I nodded like I was listening to a parent-teacher conference about somebody else’s child.
“Can you operate?” I asked.
“I’m afraid surgery won’t cure it, Mrs. Wilson.”
“Chemotherapy?”
“We can discuss treatment to manage your symptoms. To keep you comfortable.”
Comfortable. That’s the word they use when they mean the other thing.
“How much time?” I said.
“I can’t give you an exact number.”
“Please don’t protect my feelings,” I said. “I taught third grade for thirty-nine years. I’ve been lied to by experts. Just tell me.”
He sighed. He folded his glasses and held them in both hands.
“We may be talking about months rather than years.”
I nodded.
I thanked him. I actually thanked him. I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Doctor,” like he’d just told me my blood pressure was fine.
Then I walked out to the parking lot, got into my little silver Honda, put my hands on the steering wheel, and cried for almost an hour.
I didn’t turn the car on. I didn’t call anyone. A woman parked next to me, looked over, saw me, and then looked away very quickly, the way people do. She got out and went inside. When she came back forty minutes later, I was still there.
She knocked gently on my window.
I rolled it down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… do you need anything?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
She looked at me like she knew exactly what fine meant in a hospital parking lot. She nodded and went to her car.
I sat there another fifteen minutes.
Then I drove home and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich, because I didn’t know what else to do.
That evening, I couldn’t sleep.
I got out of bed and went to the closet and pulled down the cardboard box. Not the RICHARD box. The older one, underneath it. The one with my notebooks from before. From college. From the first years we were married.
I sat on the bedroom floor with my back against the bed and flipped through them.
There were grocery lists. Phone numbers of people I couldn’t remember. A pressed flower that crumbled when I touched it.
And there, on a page from the year we got married, in my own young handwriting, with a little heart drawn next to it:
See Paris someday.
Richard and I had always dreamed of visiting Paris together. We talked about it the way young couples talk about winning the lottery. We’d stand in front of the travel posters at the library. We bought a French phrase book at a garage sale for a quarter. Richard used to practice with it in the bathroom mirror. “Où est la bibliothèque?” he’d say, in the worst accent you’ve ever heard. Where is the library. That was the only sentence he ever learned.
But there was always a reason to wait. The house needed a roof. Emma needed braces. The car broke down. Next year, we’d say. Next year for sure.
Then there was no next year.
I touched the faded ink with my fingertip.
“Well, Richard,” I whispered. “I guess I’m finally going.”
The bedroom was very quiet.
“I just wish you could come with me.”
The next morning, I called Emma.
She picked up on the first ring. She’d known about the appointment. I’d told her it was routine. She knew it wasn’t.
“Mom? What did they say?”
“I’m going to Paris,” I said.
There was silence on the line.
“Mom?”
“I’m going to Paris, Emma.”
“Mom. What did the doctor say?”
So I told her.
I told her the way I’d told parents things for thirty-nine years. Calmly. Simply. Without too many big words.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing. Then I heard her put her hand over the phone, and I heard a sound behind it that I knew she didn’t want me to hear.
When she came back, her voice was thick.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. And Paris?”
“I’ve never been abroad,” I said. “Not once in sixty-eight years. Your father and I always meant to go. I want to go, Emma. I want to see it. Before.”
She was quiet again.
Then she said, “Then you’re going.”
Just like that. No arguments. No Are you sure, Mom. No What about your treatment.
I think that’s when I realized my daughter had grown up into a better person than me.
Daniel was a different story.
He came over that Sunday for dinner. He drove two hours from Columbus with his wife, Rachel, and their two boys. I made pot roast, because it’s his favorite. I’d told him about the diagnosis on the phone. He’d been quiet. Daniel has always gone quiet when he’s scared. He’s just like his father that way.
He didn’t eat much pot roast.
After dinner, while Rachel took the boys out to the backyard, he helped me with the dishes. He washed. I dried. That’s how we’d always done it.
“Emma says you’re going to Paris,” he said, scrubbing a pot.
“I am.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Mom.” He put the pot down in the water. “You shouldn’t travel alone. Not now. What if something happens? What if you get sick on the plane?”
“Then there’ll be a plane full of people to help me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I can take a week off. Rachel’s fine with it. I already asked her.”
I put down the dish towel and looked at my son. He was forty-one years old. He had gray coming in at his temples. He had his father’s jaw and his father’s habit of rubbing the back of his neck when he was worried, which he was doing right now.
“Daniel,” I said. “I taught thirty eight-year-olds how to behave during fire drills. Every year, for thirty-nine years. I can manage an airport.”
He laughed, even though he didn’t want to.
“That’s not the same thing, Mom.”
“I know it’s not.” I picked up his wet hand and held it. “But I need to do this one by myself, honey. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never done anything by myself. Not really. I went from my parents’ house to your father’s house to being your mother. I’ve never even eaten in a restaurant alone.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Will you call me?” he said. “Every day?”
“Every day.”
“And if you feel bad, you’ll go to a doctor? You won’t be stubborn about it?”
“I’m always stubborn about it.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll go to a doctor,” I said.
He sighed and went back to the pot.
“Dad would’ve gone with you,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole problem.”
I got my first passport. I had to go to the post office and have my picture taken against a white wall. The man behind the counter told me not to smile. I looked like a woman being arrested for shoplifting.
I booked a modest hotel in a neighborhood I couldn’t pronounce. It had a little picture of a balcony with red flowers on the website. I booked it for eight nights.
I bought a plane ticket. Dayton to Chicago, Chicago to Paris. I bought it on the computer at the kitchen table, and my hands were shaking so badly that I typed my credit card number wrong three times.
When the confirmation email came, I printed it out and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an apple that a student had given me in 1994.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at it.
Then I opened my notebook and wrote Dear Richard, I bought the ticket, and I stopped.
I didn’t know what to write after that.
For the first time in thirty-two years, I didn’t finish a letter to him.
On departure day, Emma drove me to the airport in Dayton. I arrived three hours early. She tried to talk me into one hour. I said three. We compromised on three.
She hugged me at the curb for a long time.
“Call me when you land.”
“I will.”
“And Mom?” She was holding both my arms. Her eyes were doing something strange. Like she was excited and nervous at the same time. “Just… keep your heart open, okay? Whatever happens.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. “It’s just a thing people say.”
It wasn’t a thing people said. Not people like Emma, anyway. But I was too nervous to think about it.
My first flight went to Chicago. It was short and bumpy. I gripped the armrests the whole time.
In Chicago, I had a three-hour layover before the flight to Paris. I found my gate, B14, and I sat down, and I checked my passport.
Then I checked it again.
Then I checked it again, because what if it had fallen out of my bag in the forty seconds since I’d last checked it?
I checked my boarding pass. I checked the screen above the gate desk. PARIS CDG. ON TIME. I checked my boarding pass against the screen.
A man sitting across from me, an older man with a cane, watched me do this about six times.
“First time?” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’ve checked that passport more times than my wife checks the stove,” he said. “And she checks the stove a lot.”
I laughed.
Then a wave of weakness came over me. It started in my stomach and went up into my head. The gate and the people and the big windows full of airplanes all went soft and gray around the edges.
I put my head down. I took a sip from my water bottle. I breathed slowly, the way the nurse had shown me.
“You okay, ma’am?” the man with the cane asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
I waited for it to pass. After a few minutes, it did.
I sat there with my hands in my lap, and I thought, What are you doing, Margaret? You’re sixty-eight years old and you’re dying and you’re sitting alone in an airport in Chicago. Daniel was right. This is foolish.
Then the loudspeaker crackled.
“Mrs. Wilson. Passenger Margaret Wilson. Please come to the desk at your boarding gate.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
My first thought was that something was wrong with my ticket. That I’d typed something wrong on the computer. That my passport picture looked too much like a shoplifter and they weren’t going to let me on.
