The Pacific Fic: a shoebox full
a shoebox full vera keller (/robert leckie), pg.
in this one, there’s a girl and the entire world away from her. please remember all your stamps. general spoilers. 3,200 words.
notes: for stepliana, for being wonderful. and another vera lover!
-
When the second or third letter comes, it’s her mother that catches it. It’s a high summer day and Vera is late to sit on the porch by the other woman; she shifts her dress to the side and lets the sun hit her legs to distract her walking discomfort of the day.
“From that nice Leckie boy,” her mother says finally. They sit on the swing and her mother flicks a small envelope at Vera, service-approved! and with her name in small, uneasy writing.
It settles between them. Vera stares at it for a moment.
“Oh,” she murmurs.
The thing is, Vera knows that she’s not the only girl that gets a letter or three from some of the boys overseas.
Robert’s around the world and then some, and she listens to girls talk about their boys like they’re some kind of group of mythological giants. It seems funny to her and even when she sits and stares with friends, the way they coo over letters and laugh and blush, it all makes her feel strange and far too old.
“I don’t really understand it.”
She declares it one day, walking home with a friend. Maggie’s fiancé is a pilot and Vera knows that he was at the harbor when it happened; the other talks about him from time to time.
“Understand what?”
She frowns too as she asks and they stop, only move inside for a few shakes and a break from the heat. They pick the table by the window and Vera stares at the church across the street.
“Why me,” she says slowly then. “Why not you, why not some other girl; the neighborhood’s a small place, a nice place. I just don’t understand why he decided to pick me. We stopped talking -”
“Virginia Marsden,” her friend smirks.
There’s a laugh and Vera looks away from the window. She smiles at the other girl, blushes and thinks of the latest letter. I feel like I should apologize for my awful handwriting, he had said and Vera laughed out loud for the first time, for the longest time too, since he started writing her.
He just wasn’t there. When she looks up though, Maggie watches her and watches her knowingly. There is something that passes between them. Vera says nothing. Maggie says nothing too.
“That wasn’t just it,” she mumbles finally. It’s then that she realizes just how quiet the city is.
There is that time where she starts to write back. It’s when the letters become fewer and fewer and she stares to think and dream in Robert’s words. It brings an awful taste into her mouth and she can’t help but think of him, there and alone and surrounded by others, just like him, who are just as there and alone as she sees Robert in her head.
But it happens one night in her room, when everybody’s gone off to bed and there is her stack of letters on her bed, sitting neatly and wrapped in ribbon. She thinks mother and almost laughs, picking them up and staring at them as they fit into her hands.
She takes a few minutes to study, to always study - his writing gets sloppier and sloppier, erratic from corner to corner and then just a small spot on the page. She moves to her desk after putting them back on the bed and digs out a few scraps from her desk, some blank pages and others just castaways from the odd notebook too.
She starts slowly. Her pencil breaks. She throws it to the side. She’s sitting at her desk too and then doesn’t like it. Picking up a pen, she moves to the bed and sits in the corner just so she can see the letters the right way.
You sound lonely, she writes finally, and tired - I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to write you back and I hope that my letter does find you well and dry after all. But I didn’t really know how to respond.
She stops. The pen presses between her fingers. She sighs when she looks at it. She tries to remember Robert then too; they were kids once with knobby knees, then they grew up and Robert was always fighting properly with his father. It’s just the way the neighborhood goes.
But when she writes again, her pen strokes slow down and are with much more of a sense of purpose.
It’s like talking to myself. She laughs too when she reads this. I can see you in my head. I remember a lot of things too - when you and I were kids and you pushed me into the mud after that summer full of nothing but rain. And then I ended it, tripping you, and you skinned your knees. But you laughed.
“You laughed a lot,” she murmurs absently. Her pen stops and moves again.
I don’t know why we didn’t talk as much after that. We grew up. You and your friends. I had my own. It’s strange, I guess, remembering -
There is that time when the letters stop. They stop and she dreams of a dead man.
First they are children. Second they are older and he’s off dating that horrible Virginia Marsden, even though she used to smirk and laugh the loudest when Vera came around for the odd visit. But then he’s a dead man, always a dead man in some muddied pit with other bodies and souls that she only knows because of a few pieces of paper and a round obscure mentions and names. She dreams he dies and no one knows, that she’s waiting and always waiting, and that’s how they know each other for the rest of her life.
But at breakfast, it’s her mother that notices. She pats her shoulder and looks at her father too, smiling sadly.
“There’s nothing this morning, dear,” she says and sits next to Vera. Her father peers at them from behind the paper and in company with the latest headlines about supporting our boys.
But Vera blinks. Vera blushes too. She’s off to work in a few hours, for a few wages and a secretarial job that bores her to death. She thinks of Robert and how he’d laugh knowing. She would tell him this.
“Oh.”
She blinks. She sighs too. “Oh,” she says again, soft and tired. She tries to be nonchalant. Her mother still serves her pancakes.
“I’m sure there’s going to be something soon.” Her mother smiles and pats her arm. “They are fighting a war for us, you know.”
She looks at her mother strangely.
It’s a common thing to say. It’s what everybody says at home - that they’re their boys and they’re fighting for the god’s honest truth and justice and peace on earth just like it’s the holidays and the holidays eternally. It’s just the way that her mother’s watching her, like she knows that all Vera’s been doing is thinking and hoping and wishing that she wasn’t home and dreaming about a dead man because there are no more letters.
Still she leans over and kisses her mother’s cheek. Her eyes close and open and she forces a smile all the same.
“I know,” she says.
I thought you were dead. It seemed like you were dead.
She tries to write him back when the letters start again. But she’s just so angry as they start to pile on her bed, over her bed, into the small box that she keeps them all in; there isn’t enough ribbon and she was prepared to be ready for that, to just be ready for that and wait for the day where she might see someone pull up to across the ways to tell Robert’s mother and father that robbie is gone and dead.
But he’s not dead. He just stopped and that scares her.
So she takes his letters, all his letters, and with the new ones, sits outside with the spring day and tries not to know the difference between her last spring and his last think. The nightmares haven’t stopped either.
I thought you were dead, idiot. I thought you were dead and I was - it was the worst feeling the world … my stomach in knots, pulling and twisting and spinning and I can’t have that feeling again. I can’t - She stops and stares at her handwriting, neat and transposed in that sort of schoolgirl way that she’s supposed to be carrying onto in her job. This year she wants to be a teacher, but she doesn’t tell him that. I don’t want that feeling again. I thought you were dead and I wished that you never asked and that I never said yes to you to begin with.
Her eyes are burning when she stops again. She sits and stares at the letter. In front of her, the day’s already winding down and she can hear her father’s car start to sputter up the driveway.
She picks up the pen again.
Don’t do anything stupid. I can’t ask you not to play hero. I can’t ask you not to do your job because that’s unfair of me and I … I imagine that there’s too much that all of us back home don’t know. I have your letters. I have all your letters. Don’t leave me with just that.
She thinks she might be falling. That just isn’t fair.
“You’re waiting for him.”
Shake days are fewer and few with Maggie now; she’s started a new job and met a new boy because her pilot is dead and she doesn’t know how to talk about her pilot quite yet. It’s the kind of think that Vera’s mother was told by Maggie’s mother, the way mothers and daughters communicate without each other and with worry.
“I’m not.”
Vera tries and means it. It’s not the truth. “I’m not,” she says again, and her finger wraps around her straw, twirling it in the way the knots in her stomach start to spin and give her a headache anyways.
Her friend frowns. “Vera,” she says and her eyes narrow, “you’re waiting for him and not in the kind of way that friends wait for friends and parents wait for their sons. I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
She stops and listens to the tunes. At the counter, the old man owner stands and wipes it clean. He has a son in the war too. There are posters in the window about calling women to arms, to become factory gals just like a few of the girls that Maggie and Vera saw the last time they had a shake.
But the world still needs teachers and secretaries, as there are still sons and daughters to teach. Vera’s still pretty restless and thinking about what Robert may say when she gets to tell him things like, “I don’t wanna stand still!” and “I’d like to see the things that I may be missing.”
She thinks he may like that. She thinks she may too.
“We were kids once,” she says and says it slowly. She cranes her neck back and stares at the open sky in the glass, watching as it starts to darken. The wind picks up but the sound’s too hollow and it’ll be fall again, faster than anticipated and slower because all Vera’s been thinking about lately are anniversaries and the kind she wants to have.
“We were all kids once.”
Maggie frowns again. She picks at her straw.
“Not like - ” Vera blinks. “It doesn’t matter. You’re right.”
But Maggie doesn’t look up at her. It’s one of those times where she can tell that her friend’s someplace where she can’t follow - but she can understand, she does understand because all she has are a pile of letters and few nightmare about a man and the green that’s ready to go and swallow him.
Vera sighs.
Maggie comes back. “About what?” she finally asks.
She does send him that letter. Maybe even out of spite.
The response is quick. The paper is dirty and dry and she thinks may even see some blood. She doesn’t think to look twice.
I’m sorry, Vera - I’m real sorry, it says.
She counts three rounds of December, three birthdays, and three sweetheart days that she has no desire to dance at because all of the sudden she’s that girl and he’s that boy and she’s not entirely sure how or why it happened.
“It’s just the way things are,” one those girls say to her and it happens upon a day that Vera tries to go shopping, stops by the church and stares; she tries to remember the snow and Robert, but the girl laughs as she passes her by. “Those boys’ll be back in no time and everything’ll be the way that it was before, you know? I don’t know what my dad’s been talking about, really.”
It occurs to her then that she might as well go inside and light candle, say a little prayer for safety and care since she’s never really thought about being brave enough to ask him when he’s coming back.
She does look away from the church. It’s a quick minute and she watches the girls pass her by, arm and arm and with wide grins. They’re not factory girls but they’re quite anything else and Vera doesn’t want to call herself anything without knowing where all of this is supposed to go.
Her eyes are still soft as she looks at the church again. “Is that what you think?” she asks.
The boxes hide under her bed.
Everybody knows it too. It used to be one, it used to be two, and now it’s three going on four; letters from him, letters that she never really wrote into courage and sent off to him, and bits of news that she wanted to keep to herself. They still call this a war and war with the kind of pride that fathers give their sons after some slim, remarkable moment that makes them grow-up too fast. It’s what her mother said to her father.
Vera only reads each letter twice.
When she doesn’t hear from him, she goes to the church and lights a candle.
She thinks she’s prepared for it. She wants to be. It’s after the new year and there is snow on ground. She is wrapped up in a coat and a cap and Philadelphia is strangely gray without the colors of the other three seasons. The walk home is lonely too. There is a letter in her pocket and she’s entirely sure if she should send it off to Robert all because if he doesn’t get it, she’s not really sure what she’d do.
Late last night, it came to her. She heard her mother and father argue quietly in the next room. The Williams boy from down the road was trying to come and call on her and it’s just all so odd to have no sense of attachment, not even a pretty blush to give to him and her parents.
But it’s still 1945 when she walks him, in between the hustling of the day. She has her paycheck in her pocket and her cap keeps slipping into her eyes. Arriving him, she walks up the slow path from the driveway. There’s a man on the stairs, hunched over and staring at the snow and his hands. It takes a moment and another minute; she picks out the blues and the dark coat, the sloppy mess of hair that peeks out of his hat.
Oh, she thinks. Oh, oh, oh.
When he looks up, it’s Robert and really Robert. She tries to swallow. “You’re back,” she says and almost calls him robbie in case she’s dreaming all of this in the end.
“Hey.”
He stands slowly. He’s heavy on his leg. She worries.
“How long have you been here?”
“A hour, maybe two,” he answers and shrugs. There are dark circles under his eyes that seem to dig right into his skin. They make her sad, endlessly sad, and taking a tiny step forward, Vera lets her hands slide out of her pockets. But she doesn’t go and try to touch him just yet.
They stand awkwardly. His hands stay stretched in front of him. She watches as the snow touches him and how he blinks, as if he were hoping this was real.
“I got your letters,” he says then too. “Sometimes they came in pieces. But I got them. I appreciate. I didn’t think you’d write me back.”
“I wanted to.”
She’s quiet. He smiles roughly. Somewhere off behind her, a car horn sounds and she hears tires screech into the snow.
“Are you hungry?” she asks and looking up, she sees her mother in the window. The older woman smiles and waves and Vera’s cheeks flush with something like embarrassment. It shouldn’t be new. It should never be new. Even with all the summers she spent with him on her porch, she still feels too old and he seems too ready to be a strange.
He sits again. His hand pushes over his thigh and she watches as he squeezes it into a fist. “Nah,” he says. “I’m all right.”
She nods and moves to sit with him. She’s neat and careful. She sits close without thinking and then thinks about it too much, blushing as she looks at him and he smiles.
“Thanks for writing me back,” he says too.
“You’re welcome.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t,” she agrees.
“But you did. You wrote me back.”
Robert’s voice is hard and tired. He seems to catch himself too and looks away before looking at her again. She studies him, hopes that she’s seeing what she needs to know before making the kind of assumption that she’s been hoping to make ever since all of this started.
She reaches forward too. Her fingers brush against his face. He flinches but she pushes on, tracing the lines that she’s been trying to remember all these years and since he’s left. It scares her and her stomach seems to swing into agreement, just as her eyes start to burn and the lump in her throat grows.
He nods. She leans in and kisses his forehead.
There is a sigh then. From him, maybe. From her, maybe too. Her mouth feels a little flushed over his skin. Her eyes close and she even lets herself linger, only to draw back in fit of small nerves. She smiles softly. It fades quickly. But she slides her hand into his.
This is real, she thinks. It’s going to be.
“Come inside,” Vera says, and her hand tightens in his. She stands first and smiles, shivering into the breeze as it picks up. Her hair falls into her eyes and as Robert stands, he presses his fingers into her hair and underneath the cap to pull it back. He doesn’t smile, but she does and his fingers linger, tracing the long line of her jaw.
He nods slowly. Then Vera breathes.
in this one, there’s a girl and the entire world away from her. please remember all your stamps. general spoilers. 3,200 words.
notes: for stepliana, for being wonderful. and another vera lover!
-
When the second or third letter comes, it’s her mother that catches it. It’s a high summer day and Vera is late to sit on the porch by the other woman; she shifts her dress to the side and lets the sun hit her legs to distract her walking discomfort of the day.
“From that nice Leckie boy,” her mother says finally. They sit on the swing and her mother flicks a small envelope at Vera, service-approved! and with her name in small, uneasy writing.
It settles between them. Vera stares at it for a moment.
“Oh,” she murmurs.
The thing is, Vera knows that she’s not the only girl that gets a letter or three from some of the boys overseas.
Robert’s around the world and then some, and she listens to girls talk about their boys like they’re some kind of group of mythological giants. It seems funny to her and even when she sits and stares with friends, the way they coo over letters and laugh and blush, it all makes her feel strange and far too old.
“I don’t really understand it.”
She declares it one day, walking home with a friend. Maggie’s fiancé is a pilot and Vera knows that he was at the harbor when it happened; the other talks about him from time to time.
“Understand what?”
She frowns too as she asks and they stop, only move inside for a few shakes and a break from the heat. They pick the table by the window and Vera stares at the church across the street.
“Why me,” she says slowly then. “Why not you, why not some other girl; the neighborhood’s a small place, a nice place. I just don’t understand why he decided to pick me. We stopped talking -”
“Virginia Marsden,” her friend smirks.
There’s a laugh and Vera looks away from the window. She smiles at the other girl, blushes and thinks of the latest letter. I feel like I should apologize for my awful handwriting, he had said and Vera laughed out loud for the first time, for the longest time too, since he started writing her.
He just wasn’t there. When she looks up though, Maggie watches her and watches her knowingly. There is something that passes between them. Vera says nothing. Maggie says nothing too.
“That wasn’t just it,” she mumbles finally. It’s then that she realizes just how quiet the city is.
There is that time where she starts to write back. It’s when the letters become fewer and fewer and she stares to think and dream in Robert’s words. It brings an awful taste into her mouth and she can’t help but think of him, there and alone and surrounded by others, just like him, who are just as there and alone as she sees Robert in her head.
But it happens one night in her room, when everybody’s gone off to bed and there is her stack of letters on her bed, sitting neatly and wrapped in ribbon. She thinks mother and almost laughs, picking them up and staring at them as they fit into her hands.
She takes a few minutes to study, to always study - his writing gets sloppier and sloppier, erratic from corner to corner and then just a small spot on the page. She moves to her desk after putting them back on the bed and digs out a few scraps from her desk, some blank pages and others just castaways from the odd notebook too.
She starts slowly. Her pencil breaks. She throws it to the side. She’s sitting at her desk too and then doesn’t like it. Picking up a pen, she moves to the bed and sits in the corner just so she can see the letters the right way.
You sound lonely, she writes finally, and tired - I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to write you back and I hope that my letter does find you well and dry after all. But I didn’t really know how to respond.
She stops. The pen presses between her fingers. She sighs when she looks at it. She tries to remember Robert then too; they were kids once with knobby knees, then they grew up and Robert was always fighting properly with his father. It’s just the way the neighborhood goes.
But when she writes again, her pen strokes slow down and are with much more of a sense of purpose.
It’s like talking to myself. She laughs too when she reads this. I can see you in my head. I remember a lot of things too - when you and I were kids and you pushed me into the mud after that summer full of nothing but rain. And then I ended it, tripping you, and you skinned your knees. But you laughed.
“You laughed a lot,” she murmurs absently. Her pen stops and moves again.
I don’t know why we didn’t talk as much after that. We grew up. You and your friends. I had my own. It’s strange, I guess, remembering -
There is that time when the letters stop. They stop and she dreams of a dead man.
First they are children. Second they are older and he’s off dating that horrible Virginia Marsden, even though she used to smirk and laugh the loudest when Vera came around for the odd visit. But then he’s a dead man, always a dead man in some muddied pit with other bodies and souls that she only knows because of a few pieces of paper and a round obscure mentions and names. She dreams he dies and no one knows, that she’s waiting and always waiting, and that’s how they know each other for the rest of her life.
But at breakfast, it’s her mother that notices. She pats her shoulder and looks at her father too, smiling sadly.
“There’s nothing this morning, dear,” she says and sits next to Vera. Her father peers at them from behind the paper and in company with the latest headlines about supporting our boys.
But Vera blinks. Vera blushes too. She’s off to work in a few hours, for a few wages and a secretarial job that bores her to death. She thinks of Robert and how he’d laugh knowing. She would tell him this.
“Oh.”
She blinks. She sighs too. “Oh,” she says again, soft and tired. She tries to be nonchalant. Her mother still serves her pancakes.
“I’m sure there’s going to be something soon.” Her mother smiles and pats her arm. “They are fighting a war for us, you know.”
She looks at her mother strangely.
It’s a common thing to say. It’s what everybody says at home - that they’re their boys and they’re fighting for the god’s honest truth and justice and peace on earth just like it’s the holidays and the holidays eternally. It’s just the way that her mother’s watching her, like she knows that all Vera’s been doing is thinking and hoping and wishing that she wasn’t home and dreaming about a dead man because there are no more letters.
Still she leans over and kisses her mother’s cheek. Her eyes close and open and she forces a smile all the same.
“I know,” she says.
I thought you were dead. It seemed like you were dead.
She tries to write him back when the letters start again. But she’s just so angry as they start to pile on her bed, over her bed, into the small box that she keeps them all in; there isn’t enough ribbon and she was prepared to be ready for that, to just be ready for that and wait for the day where she might see someone pull up to across the ways to tell Robert’s mother and father that robbie is gone and dead.
But he’s not dead. He just stopped and that scares her.
So she takes his letters, all his letters, and with the new ones, sits outside with the spring day and tries not to know the difference between her last spring and his last think. The nightmares haven’t stopped either.
I thought you were dead, idiot. I thought you were dead and I was - it was the worst feeling the world … my stomach in knots, pulling and twisting and spinning and I can’t have that feeling again. I can’t - She stops and stares at her handwriting, neat and transposed in that sort of schoolgirl way that she’s supposed to be carrying onto in her job. This year she wants to be a teacher, but she doesn’t tell him that. I don’t want that feeling again. I thought you were dead and I wished that you never asked and that I never said yes to you to begin with.
Her eyes are burning when she stops again. She sits and stares at the letter. In front of her, the day’s already winding down and she can hear her father’s car start to sputter up the driveway.
She picks up the pen again.
Don’t do anything stupid. I can’t ask you not to play hero. I can’t ask you not to do your job because that’s unfair of me and I … I imagine that there’s too much that all of us back home don’t know. I have your letters. I have all your letters. Don’t leave me with just that.
She thinks she might be falling. That just isn’t fair.
“You’re waiting for him.”
Shake days are fewer and few with Maggie now; she’s started a new job and met a new boy because her pilot is dead and she doesn’t know how to talk about her pilot quite yet. It’s the kind of think that Vera’s mother was told by Maggie’s mother, the way mothers and daughters communicate without each other and with worry.
“I’m not.”
Vera tries and means it. It’s not the truth. “I’m not,” she says again, and her finger wraps around her straw, twirling it in the way the knots in her stomach start to spin and give her a headache anyways.
Her friend frowns. “Vera,” she says and her eyes narrow, “you’re waiting for him and not in the kind of way that friends wait for friends and parents wait for their sons. I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
She stops and listens to the tunes. At the counter, the old man owner stands and wipes it clean. He has a son in the war too. There are posters in the window about calling women to arms, to become factory gals just like a few of the girls that Maggie and Vera saw the last time they had a shake.
But the world still needs teachers and secretaries, as there are still sons and daughters to teach. Vera’s still pretty restless and thinking about what Robert may say when she gets to tell him things like, “I don’t wanna stand still!” and “I’d like to see the things that I may be missing.”
She thinks he may like that. She thinks she may too.
“We were kids once,” she says and says it slowly. She cranes her neck back and stares at the open sky in the glass, watching as it starts to darken. The wind picks up but the sound’s too hollow and it’ll be fall again, faster than anticipated and slower because all Vera’s been thinking about lately are anniversaries and the kind she wants to have.
“We were all kids once.”
Maggie frowns again. She picks at her straw.
“Not like - ” Vera blinks. “It doesn’t matter. You’re right.”
But Maggie doesn’t look up at her. It’s one of those times where she can tell that her friend’s someplace where she can’t follow - but she can understand, she does understand because all she has are a pile of letters and few nightmare about a man and the green that’s ready to go and swallow him.
Vera sighs.
Maggie comes back. “About what?” she finally asks.
She does send him that letter. Maybe even out of spite.
The response is quick. The paper is dirty and dry and she thinks may even see some blood. She doesn’t think to look twice.
I’m sorry, Vera - I’m real sorry, it says.
She counts three rounds of December, three birthdays, and three sweetheart days that she has no desire to dance at because all of the sudden she’s that girl and he’s that boy and she’s not entirely sure how or why it happened.
“It’s just the way things are,” one those girls say to her and it happens upon a day that Vera tries to go shopping, stops by the church and stares; she tries to remember the snow and Robert, but the girl laughs as she passes her by. “Those boys’ll be back in no time and everything’ll be the way that it was before, you know? I don’t know what my dad’s been talking about, really.”
It occurs to her then that she might as well go inside and light candle, say a little prayer for safety and care since she’s never really thought about being brave enough to ask him when he’s coming back.
She does look away from the church. It’s a quick minute and she watches the girls pass her by, arm and arm and with wide grins. They’re not factory girls but they’re quite anything else and Vera doesn’t want to call herself anything without knowing where all of this is supposed to go.
Her eyes are still soft as she looks at the church again. “Is that what you think?” she asks.
The boxes hide under her bed.
Everybody knows it too. It used to be one, it used to be two, and now it’s three going on four; letters from him, letters that she never really wrote into courage and sent off to him, and bits of news that she wanted to keep to herself. They still call this a war and war with the kind of pride that fathers give their sons after some slim, remarkable moment that makes them grow-up too fast. It’s what her mother said to her father.
Vera only reads each letter twice.
When she doesn’t hear from him, she goes to the church and lights a candle.
She thinks she’s prepared for it. She wants to be. It’s after the new year and there is snow on ground. She is wrapped up in a coat and a cap and Philadelphia is strangely gray without the colors of the other three seasons. The walk home is lonely too. There is a letter in her pocket and she’s entirely sure if she should send it off to Robert all because if he doesn’t get it, she’s not really sure what she’d do.
Late last night, it came to her. She heard her mother and father argue quietly in the next room. The Williams boy from down the road was trying to come and call on her and it’s just all so odd to have no sense of attachment, not even a pretty blush to give to him and her parents.
But it’s still 1945 when she walks him, in between the hustling of the day. She has her paycheck in her pocket and her cap keeps slipping into her eyes. Arriving him, she walks up the slow path from the driveway. There’s a man on the stairs, hunched over and staring at the snow and his hands. It takes a moment and another minute; she picks out the blues and the dark coat, the sloppy mess of hair that peeks out of his hat.
Oh, she thinks. Oh, oh, oh.
When he looks up, it’s Robert and really Robert. She tries to swallow. “You’re back,” she says and almost calls him robbie in case she’s dreaming all of this in the end.
“Hey.”
He stands slowly. He’s heavy on his leg. She worries.
“How long have you been here?”
“A hour, maybe two,” he answers and shrugs. There are dark circles under his eyes that seem to dig right into his skin. They make her sad, endlessly sad, and taking a tiny step forward, Vera lets her hands slide out of her pockets. But she doesn’t go and try to touch him just yet.
They stand awkwardly. His hands stay stretched in front of him. She watches as the snow touches him and how he blinks, as if he were hoping this was real.
“I got your letters,” he says then too. “Sometimes they came in pieces. But I got them. I appreciate. I didn’t think you’d write me back.”
“I wanted to.”
She’s quiet. He smiles roughly. Somewhere off behind her, a car horn sounds and she hears tires screech into the snow.
“Are you hungry?” she asks and looking up, she sees her mother in the window. The older woman smiles and waves and Vera’s cheeks flush with something like embarrassment. It shouldn’t be new. It should never be new. Even with all the summers she spent with him on her porch, she still feels too old and he seems too ready to be a strange.
He sits again. His hand pushes over his thigh and she watches as he squeezes it into a fist. “Nah,” he says. “I’m all right.”
She nods and moves to sit with him. She’s neat and careful. She sits close without thinking and then thinks about it too much, blushing as she looks at him and he smiles.
“Thanks for writing me back,” he says too.
“You’re welcome.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t,” she agrees.
“But you did. You wrote me back.”
Robert’s voice is hard and tired. He seems to catch himself too and looks away before looking at her again. She studies him, hopes that she’s seeing what she needs to know before making the kind of assumption that she’s been hoping to make ever since all of this started.
She reaches forward too. Her fingers brush against his face. He flinches but she pushes on, tracing the lines that she’s been trying to remember all these years and since he’s left. It scares her and her stomach seems to swing into agreement, just as her eyes start to burn and the lump in her throat grows.
He nods. She leans in and kisses his forehead.
There is a sigh then. From him, maybe. From her, maybe too. Her mouth feels a little flushed over his skin. Her eyes close and she even lets herself linger, only to draw back in fit of small nerves. She smiles softly. It fades quickly. But she slides her hand into his.
This is real, she thinks. It’s going to be.
“Come inside,” Vera says, and her hand tightens in his. She stands first and smiles, shivering into the breeze as it picks up. Her hair falls into her eyes and as Robert stands, he presses his fingers into her hair and underneath the cap to pull it back. He doesn’t smile, but she does and his fingers linger, tracing the long line of her jaw.
He nods slowly. Then Vera breathes.