Dear Life

than it does the real old ones,” the tea lady said. “How long was she in the hospital?” she asked in a slightly menacing way of the pearls.
    “I’m trying to think. Ten days?”
    “Shorter time than that, what I heard. And shorter still when they got around to letting her people know at home.”
    “She kept it all very much to herself.” This from the employer, who spoke quietly but held her ground. “She was absolutely not a person to make a fuss.”
    “No, she wasn’t,” Corrie said.
    At that moment, a stout, smiling young woman came up and introduced herself as the minister.
    “We’re speaking of Lillian?” she asked. She shook her head in wonder. “Lillian was blessed. Lillian was a rare person.”
    All agreed. Corrie included.
    “I suspect Milady the Minister,” Corrie wrote to Howard, in the long letter she was composing in her head on the way home.
    Later in the evening she sat down and started that letter, though she would not be able to send it yet—Howard was spending a couple of weeks at the Muskoka cottage with his family. Everybody slightly disgruntled, as he had described it in advance—his wife without her politics, he without his piano—but unwilling to forgo the ritual.
    “Of course, it’s absurd to think that Lillian’s ill-gotten gains would build a church,” she wrote. “But I’d bet she built the steeple. It’s a silly-looking steeple, anyway. I never thought before what a giveaway those upside-down ice-cream-cone steeples are. The loss of faith is right there, isn’t it? They don’t know it, but they’re declaring it.”
    She crumpled the letter up and started again, in a more jubilant manner.
    “The days of the Blackmail are over. The sound of the cuckoo is heard in the land.”
    She had never realized how much it weighed on her, she wrote, but now she could see it. Not the money—as he well knew, she didn’t care about the money, and, anyway, it had become a smaller amount in real terms as the years passed, though Lillian had never seemed to realize that. It was the queasy feeling, the never-quite-safeness of it, the burden on their long love, that had made her unhappy. She had that feeling every time she passed a postbox.
    She wondered if by any chance he would hear the news before her letter could get it to him. Not possible. He hadn’t reached the stage of checking obituaries yet.
    It was in February and again in August of every year that she put the special bills in the envelope and he slipped the envelope into his pocket. Later, he would probably check the bills and type Lillian’s name on the envelope before delivering it to her box.
    The question was, had he looked in the box to see if this summer’s money had been picked up? Lillian had been alive when Corrie made the transfer but surely not able to get to the mailbox. Surely not able.
    It was shortly before Howard left for the cottage that Corrie had last seen him and that the transfer of the envelopehad taken place. She tried to figure out exactly when it was, whether he would have had time to check the box again after delivering the money or whether he would have gone straight to the cottage. Sometimes while at the cottage in the past he’d found time to write Corrie a letter. But not this time.
    She goes to bed with the letter to him still unfinished.
    And wakes up early, when the sky is brightening, though the sun is not yet up.
    There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone.
    She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.
    There is no news to give him. No news, because there never was any.
    No news about Lillian, because Lillian doesn’t matter and she never did. No post office box, because the money goes straight into an account or maybe just into a wallet. General expenses. Or a modest nest egg. A trip to Spain. Who cares? People with families, summer cottages, children to educate, bills to pay—they don’t have to think about how to spend such an amount of money. It can’t even be called a windfall. No need to explain it.
    She gets up and quickly dresses and walks through every room in the house, introducing the walls and the furniture to this new idea. A cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest. She makes coffee and doesn’t drink it. She ends up in her bedroom once more, and finds that the introduction to the current reality has to be done all over again.

    The briefest note, the letter tossed.
    “Lillian is dead, buried yesterday.”
    She